Of Collaborative Learning: An Approach for Emergent Leadership Roles Identification

During the interaction of a collaborative learning team, students usually participate in a variety of roles such as leader, follower and isolator, etc. These roles should be recognized and monitored carefully, especially the team leader, so that the collaboration might be engineered and supported appropriately. Identifying emergent leadership roles in a collaborative learning team is challenging because the roles are normally distributed and shifted among team members over time. In this paper, the emergent leadership role is the most prominent member from different points of social network views including: having the most expert power in the team so that the good respond from team members can be expected, locating relatively close to every team member so that the control message will be reached all members quickly when necessary and bridging between any pairs of team members so that the chance of having new connections of new pairs can be highly obtained. Therefore, the leadership index is proposed here as the combination of degree of centrality, closeness and betweenness. The communication patterns from the pilot study are examined and the result shows that the leadership index is sufficient enough to distinguish the leader from team members.