Abstract:
All members of a collaborative learning team are expected to be fully connected as soon as the collaboration begins or at least before the deadline because this can ensure the reduction of free riding problem and the increment of team performance. Because the leadership role or the leader is the person of influence in the team, this dissertation mainly identifies this role so that the leader could help coordinating among all team members successfully. However, identifying the leader in a collaborative learning team is challenging because this role is emergent and shifted over the collaboration time. Moreover, the influence of the leader is the main factor in order to coordinate all members successfully. This dissertation, thus, aims to identify the emergent leader by estimating the influence of the leader instead of identifying the leadership functions as in the previous studies. The influence is interpreted by measuring the leadership perception of all members to the leader from network position of the leader in a social network. The central most position of a star network is proposed as the leader position because of the physical and logical appropriations. Physically, being in the middle of all members, it is easy for the leader to coordinate all members fully connected with the short period of time. Logically, this position reflects the influence of the leader for three different social network points of views, which can be described by maximum of three social network measurements including degree of centrality, closeness and betweenness. The maximum degree of centrality represents the most expert power of the leader. The maximum closeness represents the closest distance between the leader and others. The maximum betweenness represents the most interpersonal influence of the leader to others. Consequently, the measurement called magnitude of leadership (MOL), which is the vector combination of those measurements, is proposed for representing the leadership perception of team members. The leader is any member having the highest MOL in the team. The experiment with three pilot studies demonstrates that MOL effectively represents the leadership perception of team members. Additionally, MOL is investigated with two different aspects including the factor analysis and the potential coordination ability of the leader. From factor analysis, degree of centrality significantly affects the leadership perceptions of team members, while there is the tendency that closeness and betweenness change in the same manner as the perceptions of team members. Finally, the simulation is conducted to investigate the potential coordination ability of the leader. The simulation results show that the member having the highest MOL normally coordinates all members fully connected the fastest.

Keywords : Collaborative Learning / Social Network Analysis / Emergent Leadership Role