Topic modeling Communities of Practice to Identify Learning Barriers

X-DBER 2023

Tim Ransom

who I am

• Computer Scientist
• Mathematician
• English Speaker
• Clemson ESED graduate Student
• Cat person

I am the greatest

Uses of NLP in classrooms

• Which topics students are asking for help online?
  • (Assumption) Highly requested help topics indicate difficult to learn topics
• Which topics students can find answers for online?
  • (Assumption) students are searching for help on Reddit
• Which topics students might be most exposed to online?
• Identifying barriers to learning

What is Reddit

• BBS-system pseudo-anonymous social media
  • (Basically image/text forums with accounts)
• Organized into subreddits around topics

Community	Learning Community
r/Python	r/learnpython
r/math	r/learnmath
r/engineering	r/EngineeringStudents
r/Physics	r/learnPhysics

bbs = bulletin board system mention the r/ notation for subreddit names

Conceptualizing subreddits as communities of practice [1]

• people → subscribed users
• practice → topic of the subreddit
• culture → layered internet & domain

Communities of practice are to help communicate with education researchers

Screenshot is to illustrate the online culture layered with computing culture

Latent Drilicht Allocation

• LDA [2] is a well established NLP topic modelling algorithm
• Documents are comprised of a mixture of terms and topics
• With sufficiently many documents we can correlate the relationship between terms and topics

We’ll be topic modelling Reddit post data collected through pushshift [3] and processed with R and spark [4] on Clemson’s Palemtto cluster computer [5]

Illuminatory Example

Subreddit CoP Topics can Overlap

The stuff in the “only learning” space is our considered priority

r/Python wordclouds

wordclouds are generally not so good… but we actually are pulling out a label from a concept map with weighted words here

betas -> topic density ie how frequently this term is in this topic

r/learnpython wordclouds

Data vis

Single Subreddit Topics

r/python

r/learnpython

Identified Learning Barriers

• User Input Loop
• classes vs scripts (OOP foundations)
• Interpreting debug messages
• Data formatting
• Array Indexing

I am the greatest

r/learnpython over time

• 2014
• 2015
• 2016
• 2017

r/learnpython identified trends

• Users are asking for more examples
• File I/O & array posts remain constant
• General question posts on the rise
• Getting started posts on the rise

Next Steps

• Interpret other subreddits
• Interpret other disciplines
• Investigate other text sources

Mention other LDA talk

References

[1]

J. Lave, “Situating learning in communities of practice.” 1991.

[2]

D. M. Blei, A. Y. Ng, and M. I. Jordan, “Latent dirichlet allocation,” Journal of machine Learning research, vol. 3, no. Jan, pp. 993–1022, 2003.

[3]

J. Baumgartner, S. Zannettou, B. Keegan, M. Squire, and J. Blackburn, “The pushshift reddit dataset,” in Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media, 2020, vol. 14, pp. 830–839.

[4]

J. Luraschi et al., “Sparklyr: R interface to apache spark.” Mar. 2023. Available: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=sparklyr

[5]

Feb. 2023. Available: https://docs.rcd.clemson.edu/palmetto/about/

Contact info

email: tsranso@clemson.edu

github: https://github.com/ransomts

website: tsranso.people.clemson.edu