OF COLLABORATIVE LEARNING: AN APPROACH FOR EMERGENT LEADERSHIP ROLES IDENTIFICATION Punnarumol Temdee, Bundit Thipakorn, Booncharoen Sirinaovakul Department of Computer Engineering King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand Heidi Schelhowe Department of Computer Science and Mathematics University of Bremen, Germany ABSTRACT 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. KEYWORDS Collaborative Learning, Emergent Leadership Roles, Social Network Analysis 1. INTRODUCTION An emergent leadership role is a person who started out with the same status as any member in a group of peers, but who gradually emerges as leader in the perceptions of other members by providing leadership service they value [Galanes et.al, 1997]. Conventional leadership theories focusing on the single individual, such as trait and behavior theories, seem not successful for identifying the leaders of a collaborative learning team [Sudweeks et.al., 2005], while one focusing on group interaction like functional theory seems better suit because of the changing of work culture from centralized and hierarchical to geographical and distributed environment. Additionally, a collaborative learning team normally composes of members who have relatively equal knowledge and status so it is more likely to have multi-leaders distributed and shifted among team members over time [Misiolek, 2004]. This makes understanding how leaders emerge in a collaborative learning team even more challenging. Discovering emergent leadership roles precisely not only benefits to the appropriate group collaboration support, but also to the pedagogical implication of technology-mediated learning environments designed to foster emergent leadership to the team members. IADIS International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2005) 513