Speaking (and touching) to learn: a method for mining the digital footprints of face-to-face collaboration

The research space on educational data mining exploiting data captured from the collaborative learning interactions of students, particularly in face-to-face environments, is vast but still basically unexplored. Students who build a solution in a group have to externalise and make their understandings about the topic explicit to establish common ground with their peers. This offers an enormous opportunity to capture the digital footprints of the process followed by students, these can be used to uncover patterns linked with successful collaboration and learning skills. The full spectrum of emerging technologies to support classroom and small-group work are opening up the possibility to investigate aspects of collocated collaboration. These technologies include interactive tabletops, digital whiteboards and multi-display settings. We present a method to capture, exploit and mine the digital footprints of students working faceto-face to build a concept map at an interactive tabletop. This includes a system that has a mechanism for recording the history of the collaborative process including the partial versions of the solution, applications logs, individual contributions and verbal participation of each student. This paper describes the learning environment, the system to capture a dataset and the data mining techniques that will be used for the study.