Social grid platform for collaborative online learning on blogosphere: A case study of eLearning@BlogGrid

The aim of this study is to distribute relevant contents into users (or personal information spaces) by organizing context-based communities. In this paper, we propose a novel grid platform to socialize blogs by comparing the contexts extracted from online learning blogosphere. We are especially focusing on how to apply context matching process to collaborative learning process on the blogosphere. Thereby, personal blogs are contextualized, i.e., all possible contexts on personal blogs are formalized by collecting social behaviors of bloggers. Such behaviors are (i) posting articles (or images), (ii) tagging the posted resources, (iii) linking to neighbor blogs, and (iv) interacting with the neighbor blogs. These blogger models are capable of being compared with others to quantify contextual similarities SimC between the corresponding blogs by using co-occurrence analysis method. Especially, as maximizing the contextual similarity between two blogs, the corresponding sets of tags are contextually aligned with each other. In this study, for implementing this platform, we deploy BlogGrid platform to support information pushing service to students. Through our experimental results, we found out that average weighting measurement scheme with co-occurrence patterns from responding (e.g., comments and trackback) activities is the most significant patterns for information pushing on collaborative learning. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.