Monitoring Learning Experiences and Styles: The Socio-emotional Level

This article describes the integration within an on-line learning environment - LIFE (Learning in an Interacting Framework to Experience) - of two tools that have been designed to allow "quasi-real-time" and "in situ" monitoring of complex educational "experiences/processes", thanks to the analysis of the traces left by the learners. The two tools allow to monitor and analyze, respectively, the level of social interaction - through techniques of social network analysis (SNA) - and the emotional state of learners through automatic text analysis (ATA). When combined, the two tools allow also to monitor the emotional relationships and, ultimately, the \´social\´ emotional state of the community. As case history we present and discuss the results of a monitoring experiment conducted on an educational process which lasts five months (the second part of a master\´s degree in "E-Learning: methods, techniques and applications").