A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information and Communications Technologies, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2019

In conventional collaborative learning, a small group of students share intellectual effort to pursue a consensual resolution. Traditional communication by means of, for instance verbal or written discourse is a typical tool that helps group members exchange ideas and concepts. However, this tool is not sufficiently effective to foster student attempts to form a consensus. Moreover, referential information is needed as evidence to support their understanding and interpretation of certain concepts during group discussions. To address these problems, I propose a new approach to comparing and merging mind maps produced individually by students in a group. The proposed system integrates Linked Open Data (LOD) standard web technologies to facilitate consensus-building processes. It also employs the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to uniformly represent mind maps, which enables computability and sharing of mind maps. For example, merging a set of given mind maps, a mechanism required in the formation of a group mind map, can be carried out by combining RDF graphs, each of which corresponding to one of the given mind map. A prototype is developed and evaluated in a group of 24 students using 3 criteria; system usability, student satisfaction and learning outcome. The results show that the proposed system outperforms the traditional method significantly, as it improves students{u2019} performance in discovering new knowledge, creativity, group collaboration, and consensus reaching.