Net.Create publications

2021

• Craig, K., Danish, J., Humburg, M., Hmelo-Silver, C., Szostalo, M., and McCranie, A. “Net.Create: Network Visualization to Support Collaborative Historical Knowledge Building” in International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 16 (2021), pp. 185–223. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-021-09343-9. Abstract: Students across disciplines struggle with sensemaking when they are faced with the need to understand and analyze massive amounts of information. This is particularly salient in the disciplines of both history and data science. Our approach to helping students build expertise with complex information leverages activity theory to think about the design of a classroom activity system integrated with the design of a collaborative open-source network-analysis software tool called Net.Create. Through analysis of network log data as well as video data of students’ collaborative interactions with Net.Create, we explore how our activity system helped students reconcile common contradictions that create barriers to dealing with complex datasets in large lecture classrooms. Findings show that as students draw on details in a historical text to collaboratively construct a larger network, they begin to move more readily between small detail and aggregate overview. Students at both high and low initial skill levels were able to increase the complexity of their historical analyses through their engagement with the Net.Create tool and activities. Net.Create transforms the limitation of large class sizes in history classrooms into a resource for students’ collaborative knowledge building, and through collaborative data entry it supports the historiographic practices of citation and revision and helps students embed local historical actors into a larger historical context.
• Craig, K., Humburg, M., Danish, J.A., Szostalo, M., Hmelo-Silver, C.E. and McCranie, A. (2020), “Increasing students’ social engagement during COVID-19 with Net.Create: collaborative social network analysis to map historical pandemics during a pandemic”, Information and Learning Sciences, Vol. 121 No. 7/8, pp. 533-547. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-04-2020-0105 . This paper explores changes in engagement and learning in a survey-level history course on the black death after a shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors used activity theory to focus the adaptation of Net.Create, a web-based collaborative social-network-analysis tool and to understand how it supported group-based remote learning. The authors describe how the redesigned activities sustained engagement with historical content and report coded student network entries, reading responses and surveys to illustrate changes in engagement and learning.
• Humburg, M., Craig, K., Danish, J.A., Szostalo, M. “Fostering Historical Empathy through Network Analysis: Personal Experience as a Lens for Understanding the Past” at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 8-12, 2021 (virtual conference).

2020

• Craig, K., Danish, J.A., Bae, H., Szostalo, M., Humburg, M., Hmelo-Silver, C.E., McCranie, A., “Net.Create: Network Analysis in Collaborative Co-Construction of Historical Context in a Large Undergraduate Classroom” at the 2020 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 17-21, 2020 (presentation cancelled due to COVID-19, but conference proceedings were published and included final paper submission).

2019

• Bae, H., Craig, K., Danish, J.A., Hmelo-Silver, C.E., Uttamchandani, S., Szostalo, M., “Mediating Collaboration in History with Network Analysis”, in A Wide Lens: Combining Embodied, Enactive, Extended, and Embedded Learning in Collaborative Settings, 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) 2019, pp. 1438-1440 (June 2019).