COLLABORATION IN WEB BASED LEARNING: A SOCIAL COMPUTING PERSPECTIVE

The rapid advance of Information Communication Technology [ICT] has enabled Higher Education Institutions to reach out and educate students transcending the barriers of time and space. This technology supports structured, web-based learning activities, and provides diverse multilingual and multicultural settings and also facilities for self assessment. Structured collaboration, in the conventionaleducation system, has proven itself a successful and powerful learning method. Online learners do not enjoy the same collaborative benefits as face-to-face learners because the technology provides no guidance or direction during the online discussion sessions. This paper presents a Web Based Learning Environment [WBLE] from the perspective of social computing to bring collaborative learning benefits to online learners. The paper also highlights how the deployment of social computing tools can support the creation of an open and socially shared information space for better collaboration among the learners. With Social Network Analysis [SNA] techniques, collaboration among twenty learners is explored and metrics such as in-degree, out-degree and Betweenness and collaborative network mapping are presented.