Supporting Students by Using Interaction Analysis Tools in Educational Group Blogging: A Case Study of the GIANT Tool

The current paper presents a case study for evaluating an interaction analysis tool called GIANT, which was developed in order to support collaborative activities in educational blogs. The paper focuses mainly on the perspective of the students, and examines the hypothesis that, educational blogs in combination with the GIANT tool could support participants in improving their learning process by monitoring the social interactions in blog-based learning activities. Overall, students were to a large extent satisfied with their blogging experience with GIANT rating the tool as user-friendly and easy-to-use. Moreover, evaluation findings indicate that the presence of the interaction analysis graphs from GIANT was regarded as positive by the students, functioned as a motive for increasing their blog participation.