Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019) 478e486

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Computers in Human Behavior

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Full length article

Connections between e-learning, web science, cognitive computation

and social sensing, and their relevance to learning analytics:
A preliminary study
Sachi Arafat a, b, *, Naif Aljohani a, Rabeeh Abbasi a, Amir Hussain b, Miltiadis Lytras c
a
Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia
b
Division of Computer Science & Mathematics, University of Stirling, United Kingdom
c
American College of Greece, Greece

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper we explore the interrelationship between the sociotechnical-pedagogical culture of e-
Received 31 March 2017 learning, the emerging disciplines of Web science, Social Sensing and that of Cognitive Computationeas
Received in revised form an emerging paradigm of computation. We comment in particular on the importance of this relation for
19 October 2017
the development of learning-analytics discourse. Moreover, we present an initial relational framework
Accepted 19 February 2018
Available online 22 February 2018
between these disciplines and suggest how these relations can be exploited to solve problems in each
area. This paper argues for (a) the particular importance of the abstract class of ‘learning machines’ for
Web science, (b) understanding cognitive computation as a necessary practical framework for the
Keywords:
Web science
increasingly dominating, situated informal learning context, and (c) the potential benefit of Web science
E-Learning frameworks for investigating both, contemporary research questions in e-learning and the development
Social sensing of theories for informal ubiquitous learning. Finally, we argue that exploring links between these dis-
Cognitive computing ciplines is necessary for improving practical research, for the purpose of developing learning-analytics
Situated-learning methodology for evaluating the growing types of modern e-learning contexts such as the informal sit-
Learning machines uated learning context.
© 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction Web science is a relatively new discipline that employs tradi-

This paper seeks to show how different strands of research
namely, web science, e-learning, cognitive computation form part
of a whole, and moreover, to open up theoretical and practical
points of interaction between them. Furthermore, it will show how
finding links between these discourses is important for developing
learning analytics, a sub-discourse of e-learning. In pursuing these
aims, this paper will reference machine learning and data science,
and social sensing, as technologies and theoretical frameworks,
that complement the said disciplines and the greater whole of
which they are a part.
* Corresponding author. Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King
Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia.
E-mail addresses: sachiarafat@gmail.com (S. Arafat), naifaljohani@gmail.com
(N. Aljohani), rabeeh.abbasi@gmail.com (R. Abbasi), amir.hussain@stir.ac.uk, amir.
hussain@gmail.com (A. Hussain), mlytras@acg.edu (M. Lytras).
tional ideas of observation and analysis found in the natural sci-
ences to sociotechnical phenomena and to engineering/creating
solutions (Hendler, Shadbolt, Hall, Berners-Lee, & Weitzner, 2008).
Cognitive computation, inspired by cognitive science and neuro-
science, and based on machine learning, seeks to augment hu-
man experience by creating human-computer usage contexts at a
more human-level of abstraction than the technical level of com-
puter science (Kelly, 2009; Modha et al., 2011). E-learning is a
particularly important sociotechnical phenomenon, referring not
only to learning-management systems of universities and similar
institutions, but the pervasive activity of technology-mediated
learning (Haythornthwaite & Andrews, 2011). Finally, social
sensing researchers seek to find socially meaningful patterns
amongst socially generated data such as on twitter and facebook,
patterns denoting social phenomena that are not immediately
obvious from the data (Liu et al., 2015).
Relating these areas means working out relationships between
the concepts and related technologies, and suggesting why

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.02.026
0747-5632/© 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
 S. Arafat et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019) 478e486
particular connections could be beneficial to explore. There are
already connections between cognitive computation, e-learning
and web science discussed in existing literature. E-learning theo-
rists employ cognitive models of learning, and cognitive computing
applications use machine learning techniques to understand stu-
dent behaviour. As cognitive computing seeks to exhibit human-
level abstractions of computational processes, it works to add
human-level meanings to the web of sociotechnical phenomena;
adding such meanings web-related phenomena is a raison d'e ^tre of
web science.
In addition to these existing, rather implicit relations, this paper
proposes several explicit confluences at the conceptual and prac-
tical levels between these areas. This works to rearrange each of
these areas relative to each other as parts that indicate the possi-
bility of an emergent whole. The contention is that there would be
significant benefit were researchers to focus on explicitly con-
structing this whole in the disciplinary space that opens-up from
their intersection. This space envisioned is not that of a new
discipline but is the space already occupied by Web science, except
that it is a re-orientation of that disciplinary space that readily links
to cognitive computing/e-learning, and indeed, related disciplines
dealing with sociotechnical phenomena.
Web science research is still in its early stages, seeking a
normative stable methodology and an adequate taxonomy for its
phenomena. It is hoped that the contentions here could form the
basis for a re-envisioning for web science. Similarly, it is hoped that
this work could be a means for renewed discussion amongst e-
learning, cognitive computing and social sensing researchers, about
how they ought to situate and identify their disciplines given deep
relations with one another and web science.
In relating together these disciplines, Sections 2, 3 and 4 intro-
duce e-learning, web science and cognitive computing respectively,
but they are framed in such a way as to reveal a set of initial in-
terrelationships. Section 5 discusses the main interconnections in
detail, with specific proposals about how one discipline ought to be
understood relative to another, and relative to a whole denoting a
future web science. Section 6 shows why further research exploring
these connections is important for the rather practical activity of
doing learning-analytics. Finally, section 7 summarises the key re-
lationships and proposals.
2. E-learning: informal (situated) learning as a general
phenomenon
E-learning is about connecting people, technologies and ser-
vices, for the purpose of fulfilling educational objectives. The peo-
ple concerned are the stakeholders: students, teachers, content
providers and institutions, professional associations and education
boards; the services correspond to the learning activities based on
pedagogical models (e.g. open and/or distributed learning, and
knowledge building communities) and instructional strategies (e.g.
problem solving facilitation, role-playing, contextualizing instruc-
tion); while the technologies are those that work to facilitate
content (its curation, access and generation), communication and
collaboration (Aparicio et al., 2016). The technologies here do not
only serve to assist learning but instead work to shape “the
cognitive processes that underpin learning” (Hung & Chen, 2001;
Locke, 2007, pp. 179e201), and with technology-use being cultur-
ally mediated “technologically mediated learning (via asynchro-
nous learning networks) is necessarily shaped discursively by the
practices around technology privileged in a particular cultural
milieu”.
The instructional strategies are derived from models of peda-
gogy or learning, the three main categories of which are behavioral,
cognitivist and constructionist, each providing principles defining
479
what it means to learn with respect to the nature of the content, the
behaviors of teacher/student and the setup of the learning context
that is to generate the ideal learning event.1
Of particular relevance is the theory of learning as situated
(Bell, Maeng, & Binns, 2013; Bridges, Chan, & Hmelo-Silver, 2016;
Dawley & Dede, 2014; Lave & Wenger, 1991), which holds that
most learning is embedded or situated within activities that may
not explicitly frame itself as learning, and that, learning is often
unintentional as opposed to being deliberate. What this means is
that e-learning services, instead of being centralised, must be
available as a general feature of other containing services, so that it
can generate a learning event in the midst of the student being
engaged in other activities. These other activities comprise
`authentic contexts' of learning, as they are the normal situ for the
corresponding knowledge to be learned. Another salient aspect of
situated learning theory, which can be seen as a necessary
concomitant of the situatedness of the learning event, is its
collaborative aspect. The learning event, in offering curated con-
tent and linking the learner with an expert or teacher, involves
them in a community of practice, in which they start as a novice
and migrate towards being an expert through engaging in learning
events (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Although this communal
participation involves the social construction of knowledge,
perhaps the most primary aspect for analysis here is the learning
situation/event itself as a phenomenon, which points to the
learner's expe-rience. This means both behaviour and cognition
would ultimately need to be considered, a claim further supported
by Khine and Saleh, (2010).
E-learning like all technology augmented social processes
where a human agent disappears and is represented by a live video
or other representation, works to replace real-presence with a
lesser type of presence: telepresence. This effects the way students
take risks and the way they develop their relationship with
teachers as apprentices, something particularly important for skill
acquisition type learning (Dreyfus, 2008). This can be understood
as being an ultimate limit that discerns such types of e-learning
from traditional learning, and is something around which recent
models of learning, roughly in the area of situated learning, are
based (Garrison, 2011). These models explicitly suggest how some
of this lack of presence can be alleviated. While e-learning focuses
on sociotechnical processes with educational objectives, web sci-
ence instead has a scope extending over the general space of
sociotechnical processes.
3. Web science: studying the social machine
Web science is an emerging discipline which takes the web as its
subject matter. It understands the web as heteregeneous, inter-
connected system of heterogeneous entities, whether each such
entity is of human or device origin. These are entities connected by
virtue of a physical (electronic) relationship such as two nodes on a
network or two people in a room, or a semantic relationship, such
as between a system and its user (participating in meaningful
processes) or a human user and their ‘virtual friends’ or their avatar
(e.g., as in SecondLife). The founders of web science understand it
as a “science of decentralised information structures” (Berners-Lee
et al., 2006), they iterate that such a science (Berners-Lee et al.,
2006):
1
For our purposes, the event can be formal in the sense of explicitly and actively
following an instructional plan, e.g. Gagne's nine events: gaining attention,
providing content and assessment or spurring recall of prior knowledge, etc.
(Gagne, 1985). Or instead, the instructional plan could be implicit, which means
that while such instructional events may be present they may not follow a standard
sequence, and would only be understood as an instructional event post-hoc.
480 S. Arafat et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019) 478e486
is essential for understanding how informal and unplanned
informational links between people, agents, databases, organi-
sations and other actors and resources can meet the informa-
tional needs of important drivers such as e-science and e-
government. How an essentially decentralised system can have
such performance designed into it is the key question of Web
Science
Like any other space of phenomena, such as that of the natural
world, there are meaningful patterns of relationships between
entities, ways to intervene to change these patterns and hence ‘edit’
these spaces; and ways evaluate spaces and processes therein
concerning their function. Unlike natural science however, in tak-
ing the synthetic, easily manipulatable world of technology as one
of its objects of study, web science combines not only the distant
analysis of phenomena but their engineering, in an intimate way.
Furthermore, as aspects of the social world are also its object of
study, social policy is a primary concern for web science and not
merely an additional variable. Web science is hence (Berners-Lee
et al., 2006):
not just about methods for modelling, analyzing and under-
standing the Web at the various micro- and macroscopic levels.
It is also about engineering protocols and providing infrastruc-
ture, and ensuring that there is fit between the infra-structure
and the society that hosts it. Web science must coordinate en-
gineering with a social agenda, policy with technical constraints
and possibilities, analysis with synthesiseit is inherently
interdisciplinary.
The primary phenomenon web science introduces is the social
machine, which refers not only to the interactional possibilities of,
and between, a collection of human and technological entities, but
actual instances of such interaction. The interactions presuppose a
purpose or reason, such that a user changing a Wikipedia entry
upon a world event to reflect a new reality. The social machine
discerns between the human ‘creative’ aspect of a technology-
mediated work, i.e. “the generation of online content (e.g.,
uploading a photo or writing some text),” and the ‘administrative’
aspect referring to what the technology does without this creative
guidance. Other than Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and
Instagram are social machines, that is as a whole and also in part
(i.e. with respect to its small sub-aspects). It is however, often
difficult to differentiate between the creative and the administra-
tive. A creative task can be understood as administrative and vice
versa. And moreover, the border between these aspects of work is
not static. Shadbolt et al. provide a revised definition that resolves
this in Smart, Simperl, and Shadbolt (2014): “Social machines are
Web-based sociotechnical systems in which the human and tech-
nological elements play the role of participant machinery with
respect to the mechanistic realization of system-level processes”; a
definition inspired from the extended-mind hypothesis in the
philosophy of mind (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Unlike their original
definition, social machines are not processes but physical systems
(Smart, Simperl, and Shadbolt, 2014, p. 57):
It is important to note that we are not saying that social ma-
chines are processes, as would seem to be implied by the defi-
nition of social machines offered by Berners-Lee and Fischetti
(Aljohani & Davis, 2012b). Rather, we are saying that social
machines are the physical systems that perform, implement or
realize such processes … Tinati and Carr (Stracke, 2016) thus
write that “any task that requires the co-constitutional
involvement of humans and technologies is a form of social
machine”.
A machine is social in that it participates in social phenomena in
a way that past technologies did not. This is an effect of the
pervasiveness of modern technology and is due to increasing por-
tions of human experience being mediated by technology. In
addition to social networking and similar applications, social ma-
chines involve tools that personify human actors such as virtual
assistants (e.g. Siri, Viv and Cortana), medical assistants or expert
systems that support medical diagnoses, and home automation
systems.
The understanding and engineering of social machines neces-
sitate the adding of layer(s) of meaning over existing information
structures, to understand what it is that makes particular activities
meaningful as social activities. The semantic web (SW) corresponds
to these layers. It is crucial for recognizing (or making intelligible),
and creating or purposefully intervening-upon social machines. As
the social machine indicates a social process that involves tech-
nology, the creating (or manipulating) or comprehension of such
machines needs to be associated with a cognitive or social meaning.
This meaning is with respect to its place, purpose and function
within the social machine or process to be created. In having this
abstract layer of meaning, the data and technology can be under-
stood humanistically, and can be reasoned about according to its
“social attributes such as trustworthiness, reliability, and tacit ex-
pectations about the use of information, as well as privacy, copy-
right, and other legal rules” (Hendler & Berners-Lee, 2010, p. 158).
The SW has the effect of putting data and information structures
on a level playing field as relational data, and as types of social
machines; and of thereby being a condition of possibility for the
appearance of social machine phenomena into the public sphere.
Relational data frameworks work to express ontologies and are a
way to represent the result of ontological discourse about relations
between different information structures. This labelling by the SW
acts as the mapping out of a space of phenomena: whereas the web
ontology language (OWL) and other technologies act as a scheme
for hypothesis/theory generation/evaluation. In this sense, the
main point of the SW is not to establish formal ontologies but to
suggest links between entities premised on existent ontologies, or
folksonomies. If a datum is to be of value in some context, then SW
techniques should ideally reflect this through the semantics
collected on that data. The SW works with URIs: basic web objects.
The semantics emerge through formal ontologies or informal
socially-agreed ontologies from folksonomies; the social machine is
a phenomenon formed out of the SW of relations.
The scientific methodology for forming and testing hypotheses
about SW components, or higher level phenomena such as social
machines, is still emerging. It adopts but is not exhausted by, the
extensive work of reasoning over SW. For our purposes of linking
web science to other disciplines, current methodologies still lack a
normative integration with statistical machine learning ap-
proaches. In addition, it requires an extensive taxonomy of phe-
nomena, of social machines in particular, the properties of which
would be the subject matter of the hypotheses. For example, hy-
potheses about how regular particular types of social machines are,
how their particular properties, e.g., sociality, is likely to change
over time or over a set of meaningful events (Clark & Chalmers,
1998; Clark & Mayer, 2016; Smart et al., 2014). Given the dynamic
nature of the web, it is especially incumbent on a coherent science,
in this context, to address regular phenomena. The work of Smart
et al. (2014) begins to resolve the problem of taxonomy by sug-
gesting a significant number of properties by which social ma-
chines can be categorized. It can also be understood to be working
towards an ontology of possible and actual social machines.
In order to effect a sufficient, broad-based semantic web, human
designed folksonomies or ontologies require to be complemented
with machine-estimations of meaningful patterns. Cognitive
 S. Arafat et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019) 478e486
computation, over and above the immediate machine-learning
techniques required to do this, can be understood as the effort to
create an overall framework for realising and employing semantic
webs. By cognitive computation here we do not mean a group of
applications nor a collection of technologies by a paradigm.
4. Cognitive computing as a paradigm centered around social
machines
Cognitive computing is a modern paradigm for computation
with a nascent vision for the future of the human-machine rela-
tionship. While conventional computer science is concerned with
logical and mathematical operations on abstract data, cognitive
computing works in addition, at a higheremore humanisticelevel
of abstraction, with the manipulation and analysis of words, con-
cepts, semantics; and on knowledge representation, comprehen-
sion and learning (Demirkan, Earley, & Harmon, 2017; Wang,
Pedrycz, Baciu, Chen, & Yao, 2010). Cognitive computing typically
focuses on those spaces that exhibit rich human-machine config-
urations, usually involving adaptive devices in pervasive contexts
working with messy unstructured data. The purpose therein is to
build systems that are able to understand, replicate and effectively
complement human activity. IBM's Watson is the typical example
of a cognitive computing system, but this was preceded by expert
systems such as those for medical diagnoses. The purpose of
Watson however, is to be a cognitive computing platform that can
be applied across contexts.
Cognitive computing research ranges from the design of hard-
ware and software implementation of neural processors, to algo-
rithms and frameworks supporting the replication of human-like
analysis of data (e.g., machine learning algorithms), to more theo-
retical research aimed at understanding effective human-machine
combinations for completing tasks through modelling cognitive
processes. The overall aims of cognitive computing research are to
understand, evaluate, create/support and intervene-upon human-
machine configurations. With respect to its creative/engineering
function, the goal is not only to make more effective the conduct of
human tasks buteand this is the nascent visioneto do so in a way
that is natural, and that allows for deeper human engagement.
Furthermore, with cognitive computing focusing on human-
technology systems, as opposed to technology-only systems, this
latter goal of cognitive computing can be understood in the context
of web science as corresponding to the establishment of effective
ecologies of human-machine configurations or social machines.
As with social machines, cognitive computing seeks to fulfill
these goals through augmenting human senses and abilities with
technology (Kelly & Hamm, 2013). Cognitive computing, web sci-
ence and the concept of the social machine, all presuppose the
relation between technology and the cognitive agent as being
depicted by the extended-mind idea (Clark & Chalmers, 1998).
Moreover, cognitive computing research is not only focused on
single-user contextsealthough this constitutes a large portion
thereofewith applications like virtual assistants. Its
scopeesomething indicative of its visionelike that of web science,
also includes groups of users. There is no limitation to the context
or number of the agents that could come under analysis by cogni-
tive computing or intervention by cognitive computing applica-
tions. The context could be as large as a city, such that one can speak
of creating a ‘operating system for cities’ (Kelly & Hamm, 2013, p.
178). This would be a high-level social machine that forms a
foundation for other constituting machines, that works to represent
the technology-mediated human activities typical of a modern city.
Thus, the use of Watson in context constitutes a social machine
(Hendler & Mulvehill, 2016, p. 131). Even without a live human
element, an instance of automatic processing by Watson, were it to
481
use prior human created informationee.g., from Wikiecould still
be considered to constitute a social machine. In general, where AI
systems train on human input, their execution at a later instance
corresponds to the functioning of a social machine. The social
machine in which machines participate, presumes that machine to
increasingly be intelligent, i.e., to use learning algorithms or
decision-making techniques (Hendler & Mulvehill, 2016, p. 135).
This is due to the pervasiveness of technology mediation.
5. Points of connection
The overall research trend in web science, cognitive computing
and e-learning are in a sense, heading towards a confluence, either
in their practical or theoretical/conceptual aspects. By practical we
mean not only in terms of tools or technology, but also, primarily,
with respect what a discipline ‘thinks’ (or its scholars think) ought
to be done. For example, both cognitive computing and web science
think that the web requires layers of meaning, so that it can be
worked-with at increasingly human-levels of abstraction. The
following discusses some significant ways each such discipline can
thereby related to another, ways that ought to be further explored.
5.1. Learning machines as social machines: pervasive and
presupposed
Social machines do not only denote a key phenomenon consti-
tuting the modern web. Instead, they are phenomena radically
present across the range of modern human life. They have been the
means for enabling subcultures of decentralised human activity
that have been particularly disruptive empowering, and highly
influential in shaping the modern human experience. Social ma-
chines constitute the predominant participatory phenomenon
involving billions of users. E-learning situations, we proposeealong
with (Yee-King, Krivenski, Brenton, Grimalt-Reynes, & d'Inverno,
2014)eare learning machines. They are a subset of social machines,
with educational objectives beyond whatever social objectives may
be present. This concept is not foreign to web science, for as
Shadbolt (2013, pp. 202e203) states, knowledge acquisition is
indeed a common purpose of social machines. This section explores
some implications of the relation between web science and e-
learning not addressed in these other works.
As a sub-type of social machine, a learning machine inherits
properties of general social machines while providing additional
properties. With respect to the administrative and creative part of a
social machine, in an e-learning context, the bringing together of
people and diverse content, to serve under an instructional strategy
can be understood to be the administrative part. The creative part
can be thought of as the sequencing of relevant strategies, for
designing a learning event customised for a particular learning
context. The additional properties of a learning machine along with
methodologies for studying it, such as learner analytics (Aljohani &
Davis, 2012a, 2012b, 2013; Daud et al., 2017), can in turn be un-
derstood as a type of social machine analytics with respect to
educational objectives. This alignment of a learning machine with
the social-sphere through its being understood as a social-machine
is especially apt given the trend towards social learning in e-
learning discourse (cf. Zhang et al., 2015) where social learning is in
particular responsible for fostering individual creativity amongst
learners in an online context (Zhang et al., 2017).
E-learning as situated learning not only accounts for a large
share of learning machines, and hence real learning events, but it is
also, arguably, a function for a significant number of social ma-
chines. It is important to emphasize that this refers not to formal
learning but informal learning, and specifically situated learning.
From asking questions and receiving answers on Quora, to the
482 S. Arafat et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019) 478e486
various types of situated learning on stack-exchange, to informal
skills learning on various forums pertaining to consumer goods,
learning as a function is pervasive in the set of social machines.
In the modern time, due to technology mediated living making
up increasing portions of human experience, there are far more
situations of informal and situated learning than formal ones. These
are increasingly, ubiquitous situations further contextualised by the
learner's relation to their city as a whole opposed to specific
learning environments. The pervasiveness of such learning works
to suggest a natural pedagogical function of social interactions.
Thus, the scope of e-learning as a discipline, reaches well beyond
supporting institutional learning agendas to (a) the explanation of
the human experiences in learning machines, and (b) the creation
of strategies for purposefully intervening upon informal situated
learning processes, which are processes embedded in other pro-
cesses by means of application-level services. Realising informal
situated learning by such servicesedue to the highly contextual
nature of such embedded learning eventserequires a learning
support system to make sense of numerous contextual factors
(Aljohani & Davis, 2012a, 2012b). This is where cognitive
computing systems, as decision support systems making sense of
big data, relate to e-learning at the practical level. Specifically,
cognitive computing is the means of creating services supporting e-
learning as an embedded practice.
E-learning systems pervasive in this way, exhibiting often im-
plicit and usually informal learning scenarios, have a particular
social significance (Aljohani et al., 2012). We contend that they
work to fulfillein a rather unprecedented wayeIllich's ideal of
informal education (Czerkawski, 2016; Goldie, 2016; Illich, 1973;
Marin, Masschelein, & Simons, 2017). An ideal whose realization
corresponds to a means to tackle social inequities partially engen-
dered by the still dominant institutionalised forms of learning.
Learning machines thereby, have arguably been the most disruptive
of all social machines. Social machines from Wikipedia, to Udacity,
to open coursewares of institutions, to educational social media in
general, have made irreversable impact not only to formal educa-
tional practices but, by creating subversive spaces for informal
education beyond institutions, to technology-mediated livingeby
‘injecting’ greater possibilities for learning therein. As such they
have workedeperhaps inadvertentlyeto form Illich's ‘educational
web’. This is a system of social structures that enable one to
transform their immediate experience into one of learning and
sharing by connecting those that have something to share with
those that want to learn it from them, and by allowing those that
want to learn with a system of resources to accomplish their goals,
at any time (Illich & Illich, 1971). Illich's web is not only practical but
political, it is learning as empowerment in its fullest sense. Learning
machines have thereby pervasively intervenedeupon become
situatedein a range of sub-cultures that have some learning
component.
Research questions pertaining to e-learning, such as those in
Haythornthwaite and Andrews (2011) and Sato, Hanaoka,
Okumura, and Koshimura (2016) about the properties of a
learning community, are about the nature learning machines, and
required to be answered through developing a taxonomy. This is a
task equivalent to the one undertaken in web science research
(Smart et al., 2014) for general social machines. Both web science
and e-learning are still at the beginning stages with respect to this
task, and this is due to the rapidly expanding situated contexts of
learning machines and social machines. The taxonomy given for
web science in Smart et al. (2014) could be understood as
analogical to properties for learning machines. For example, the
social machine property of ‘social role differentiation’, used to
specify whether the roles of agents associated with the respective
social machine is clear or ambiguous, not only makes sense for
learning machines but is also, particularly useful. In a learning
machine context, especially an informal context such as a forum
on consumer products, the roles of teacher/student or expert/
novice, are not always clear or predetermined. Similarly, for the
property of ‘user autonomy’ as learner autonomy, ‘User Involve-
ment in Quality Evaluation’ as ‘the degree to which there are
student-directed assessments (or self-assessments)’, and several
others in Smart et al. (2014), are of immediate benefit for the e-
learning context.
Existing research questions in e-learning such as those in
Haythornthwaite and Andrews (2011) can be addressed through
asking similar questions about social machines and querying the
web science literature, and adapting answers to the e-learning
context. In this way, the web science work in Clark and Chalmers
(1998), Clark and Mayer (2016) and Smart et al. (2014) could be
developed by adding properties to differentiate learning machines
as a subclass of social machines. Web science researchers are in fact
seeking to expand their taxonomies in this way: “Clearly, the effort
to develop a hierarchically-organized set of social machine classes
is an important focus area for future work, and it could feed into the
aforementioned effort to develop a social machine ontology”
(Smart et al., 2014).
Furthermore, note that it is the situatedness of informal types
of learning that relates corresponding learning machines to a large
range of social machines. In particular, many such social machines
can be said to presuppose learning machines. Conversely, to the
extent these learning machines are conditioned by the processes
in which they are embedded, e-learning studies would need to
consider the encapsulating processes require to be studied. Thus,
the study of situated learning machines converges with the study
of encapsulating social machines, and hence, there is a movement
of e-learning research into web science research. In particular,
were embedded learningeimplemented for example, as learning
as a serviceeto be required to fulfill particular standards, then
these standards would interact with the general space of web
standards that apply to the corresponding encapsulating social
machines. It would also mean that, for the scientific purpose of
explaining the effect of learning machines, that the existing
discourse around the social functions of encapsulating social
machineseas is part of web science and computational social
science discourseewould have to be brought to bear on what
learning as an embedded function therein could mean. Hence the
need for further theoretical research in e-learning to consider all
these aspects. However, if such research is indeed deemed to be
important for e-learning as a discipline and were discourses
therein to proceed with such research in a normative fashion, then
such research would arguably merge, in both content and style,
with web science research.
In general, the varied situations of informal learning as contexts
of technology-mediated living engender new psychosocial con-
structs, epistemologies and multimodal processes in which people
are pervasively involved, this calls for new theories of learning
(Haythornthwaite & Andrews, 2011, p. 62). The increasingly diverse
cultural forms made possible and/or supported by technology,
especially participatory cultures (Haythornthwaite & Andrews,
2011), mean increasingly diverse contexts of learning: new the-
ories are required to address the particulars of these contexts.
Common research questions for situated learning ask about (1)
how collaborative/active learning and learning communities can be
recognized (empirically and conceptually) and defined in terms of
group behaviour or cognitive states, (2) what optimal types and
levels of interaction for fulfilling learning objectives are, and (3)
how communities foster learning. The questions of type (1)
 S. Arafat et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019) 478e486
pertaining to recognizing learning, are akin to the standard ques-
tions in web science about what properties define social machines
of particular types. This pertains to the fundamental and common
scientific question about the nature, observability and regularity of
phenomena. The properties given in Shadbolt (2013) offer, in
addition to learning-specific properties, a rich set by which to
define a wide range of embedded learning scenarios.
5.2. Cognitive computing: connecting to E-learning and web science
A learning machine depicts a cognitive computation situation:
there are one or two real cognitive agents, possibly many more to
depict student interaction, and possibly several simulated agents.
The social machine is the sum total of interactional and processual
possibilities limited by the purpose of ‘learning’ and related social-
isations. Beyond this conceptual relationship, cognitive computing
relates to e-learning at a practical level. Informal, embedded
learning, is generally more context-dependent than the formal
equivalent. Thus in order to fulfill its objectives, in its practical
aspect, it appears to incline towards technologies able to address
many contextual factors. This necessitates dealing with large
amounts of data, and not only for goal of customizing learning
experienceeone of the particular goals of e-learning in
generalestatistical machine learning approaches seem the direction
to go. However, beyond these approaches, the cognitive computing
paradigm, which in particular considers the human-machine com-
bination, in addition to something like the Watson framework, ap-
pears to be a fruitful direction for further e-learning research.
Web science already shares its general research perspective with
that of cognitive computing (Clark & Mayer, 2016; Hendler &
Mulvehill, 2016). This is since web science's key phenomenon, the
social machine, pertains to a combination of human and machine
aspects. CC is particularly interested in studying and harnessing
such a combination. In this respect, it could be said that cognitive
computing theory mainly studies social machines, except that the
focus appears to mainly be on two agent systems such as exempli-
fied by personal virtual assistants such as Siri. However, even such
systems, due to depending on social data through opinion mining
and such, can be understood in general to be multiagent systemseas
is the norm for social machines as studied in web science.
Moreover, the semantic web, where metadata allows for logical
inference between objects, is necessary for supporting the highly
contextualised learning in situations of embedded informal
learning. This is because different sources of information inherited
from encapsulating processes require to be effectively related
together using preexistent ontologies in order to determine this
inference. Thus, cognitive computing approaches effectively apply
to these learning contexts through the technology of the semantic
web taken from web science, of prior user-labelled objects and a
logic that can effect learner analytics or be used to generate
teaching content.
5.3. Social sensing as denoting the observational apparatus for web
science
The nascent area of social sensing is about detecting socially
meaningful events and phenomena amongst social media content,
or more simply, for detecting/constructing the ‘community view-
point’ for real life or online events (Jarwar et al., 2017). Of particular
use in public health applications, social sensing has been employed
to map out areas affected by epidemics from live analyses of search
engine queries about infection (Ginsberg et al., 2009; Sato et al.,
2016). It has similarly been employed in cases of natural events
such as earthquakes, to live-analyse twitter feeds to predict the
course of further shock waves (Sakaki, Okazaki, & Matsuo, 2010).
483
Moreover, social sensing is being used to analyse life saving
healthcare scenarios. Users in developing countries who lack suf-
ficient blood collection facilities use twitter to find blood donors
(Abbasi et al., 2017). A patient sends a request to a broker
(disseminator) who then forwards the request to potentially, mil-
lions of followers, often eliciting a successful response from a
donor. Furthermore, social sensing has been used to measure
research impact in the form of altmetrics. It demonstrated a posi-
tive correlation between the impact of a publication and its
popularity as a discussion topic on social media (Thelwall, Haustein,
Lariviere, & Sugimoto, 2013).
How does social sensing then relate to web science, cognitive
computing and e-learning? In the e-learning context, forum activ-
ities exhibit social phenomena based around question-answering
processes, and can be ‘sensed’ (Zhang, Ackerman, & Adamic,
2007). Cognitive computing systems employing machine learning
approaches to discover patterns of user behavior are essentially
‘social sensing’, even though this may only be an aspect of the
overall function of such systems. The discipline of social sensing
works explicitly to relate computationally acquired patterns to so-
cially meaningful phenomena. There is however a salient relation-
ship between web science and social sensing. To the extent web
science seeks to first discover social machines (i.e. some regular
relation or interactive pattern between users and software/infra-
structure) it is doing social sensing. The social machine can thereby
be understood to depict a regular social phenomenon, that is first
sensed prior to it being called a social machine phenomenon. Hence,
social sensing can be understood to denote the observational
apparatus, i.e. techniques, concepts, tools, for the science of web
science, in the same way as corresponding experimental method-
ology and tools form the same apparatus for the natural sciences.
If social sensing is understood in this way, then the applications of
social sensing, from earthquake prediction, to sociotechnical and
health phenomena such as blood donor finding to epidemic map-
ping, each become a type of social machine, i.e., geo-disaster and
public-health types of social machine respectively. All such machines
can thereby be characterised as per the taxonomy in Smart et al.
(2014). Furthermore, they can be checked for embedded informal
learning machines, to which learner analytics can be applied. For
example, the blood-donation public health social machine would
supposedly have a learning component wherein an important, yet
rather simple learning objective, would be for the seekers of blood
donors to quickly discover the best brokers to whom to send their
request so as to elicit the quickest responses (Abbasi et al., 2017).
6. Upshot for learning analytics
The benefits of linking between the mentioned disciplines are
primarily to the conceptual and foundational layers of their cor-
responding discourses. However, any such disciplinary progress at
these layers will arguably have numerous advantages at the prac-
tical/empirical levels. This section considers the potential benefit of
such disciplinary linking to the problem of learning analytics,
which pertainsein the language of this papereto the methodology
for evaluating learning machines.
Consider first summary of the above ideas in Fig. 1 wherein web
science is situated as a methodology for observing, discussing and
manipulating sociotechnical phenomena. As depicted therein, web
science understands these phenomena as social machines. More-
over, in discovering social machines, web science is sensing the
socialewhich is the purview of the social sensing
discourseeespecially when it is employing machine learning and
cognitive computation methods to do so, as is common to social
sensing. Furthermore, the phenomena discovered, construed as
social machines, can refer to any technology-mediated human
484 S. Arafat et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019) 478e486
Fig. 1. Cognitive Computing, social sensing and E-learning as aspects of Web science.
activityeas would correspond to the cognitive computing
scenarioesuch as e-learning activity. The specific technology-
mediated activity conditions the type of social machine observed,
which in this case would be a learning-machineea sub-
phenomenon (a phenomenon inscribed within the more general
phenomenon) of the social machine.
With respect to such learning machines, any methodology for
their measurement such as those pertaining to learner analytics
must presuppose particular construals of learning phenomena such
as that specified by a learning machine. Analytics corresponds to
the evaluation of processes and states, of student discourses, tests,
student interactions pertaining to learning, social metrics, infor-
mation about student's emotional state (Bahreini, Nadolski, &
Westera, 2016) and demographics, etc. (Martinez-Maldonado
et al., 2016). Any such evaluation process presupposes a number
of concepts. For example, value concepts, cognitive concepts
(depicting students emotional state for example) and an idea of
how to construe a student's ‘social context’ (e.g., as to what factors
should be included or ignored).
Given the (a) increasing variety of learning-machinesefor situ-
ational learning in particular (Carter & Adkins, 2017) and (b) the
need to proactively engage in expanding this variety and creating
further situational-learning opportunities as part of learning
innovation in order to tackle modern education challenges (Clark &
Mayer, 2016; Stracke, 2016), it is incumbent on the e-learning (and
specifically the learning-analytics) community to develop the cor-
responding evaluation/analytics methodologies for learning ma-
chines. An implication of the interdisciplinary linking introduced in
this paper is that such methodology ought to be informed by work
in these related disciplines. There are already shared evaluation
approaches, such as machine learning approaches that can be
applied to finding patterns in data in general, however that is not
the main import here. Were learning-analytics to actively consider
these relationships and the corresponding disciplines, it would
firstly have a source of measures, metrics and computational ap-
proaches it could borrow. More importantlyedue to its relatively
young ageelearning-analytics discourse would find in these other
disciplines a framework of concepts (such as the notion of social
 S. Arafat et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019) 478e486
machine and its myriad properties) that present a means for
developing a rigorous foundations for modeling the base of pa-
rameters for analytics.2
Borrowing from these other disciplines may not only be a
curious and interesting research aim, but necessary. Learning
innovation implies the need to consider complex situated and so-
cial settings of learning, aspects of which are already dealt with by
web science and cognitive computing. If learning-analytics dis-
courses do not venture into appropriating concepts and metrics
from web science and cognitive computing, and identify itself in a
restricted sense as an evaluative discourse for only typical learning
machines, then it is expected that web science and cognitive
computing discourses would ultimately take over its space because
they seek to study learning-based social machines or learning-
applications of cognitive computation respectively.
Finally, the growth of wearable-technologies (Chen et al., 2017;
Zhuang et al., 2016) which represents cognitive computing style
scenarios of technology-use, and the inevitable uptake of such
technologies through learning-innovation, is an important emer-
gent context where cognitive computing and e-learning (and hence
learning analytics) are forced into conversation. Any evaluation
metric for the corresponding types of learning experiences pre-
sumes a rigorous understanding of human cognition and behav-
iour. Cognitive computation, in its theoretical capacity, in seeking to
address technologies that in particular allow for human-computer
cooperative activity, also presumes such an understanding. This
presents yet another reason for proactively linking to the afore-
mentioned disciplines for the sake of developing an analytics
(especially in developing its foundations) that can consider the
different modes of technology-use in learning.
7. Conclusion
Web science is a science of sociotechnical phenomena known as
social machines, that capture an increasingly large range of social
activity pertaining to human-machine interactions. To the extent
cognitive agents are considered in such machines, cognitive
computation concepts are of use to web science researchers.
Learning machines are a special type of social machines. Learning
machines inherit properties of social machines while contributing
properties to social machines in which they are encapsulated; this
is especially so in the case of informal situated learning. These are
properties pertaining to educational objectives. E-learning like web
science can benefit from cognitive computing concepts when
making cognitive models of learners. The main mutual benefit of
cognitive computing to both web science and e-learning at a
practical level is a framework such as Watson that could address
the numerous contextual factors in social machines and in situated
learning machines specifically, to offer detectioneor social-sen-
singeof relevant social/learning phenomena therein. Or to
intervene-upon or support corresponding processes.
The key benefit offered by web science to e-learning is a
framework in which the modern yet foundational problems of e-
learning could be investigated. As web science is still in its early
stages. Its space of phenomena (i.e., social machines), of which
learning machines make up a large share, is still ambiguous.
2 tional technologies: Theory and practice. In Educational technologies in medical
While there are examples of such conceptual borrowing in e-learning and
learning-analytics research, sometimes understood as cognitive learning analytics
(Kovanovic, Gasevic, Hatala, & Siemens, 2017; Pecaric, Boutis, Beckstead, & Pusic,
2017), there is not yet a wide enough recognition for a general need for such
research let alone of the necessity of a normative methodology for such appro-
priation. In addition, any rigorous discourse on cognitive learning analytics would
clearly also need to consider the existing discourse in cognitive computing, and
thereby require to relate conceptually between cognitive computing and e-learning.
485
Taxonomies exist but could be significantly improved-upon by
appending them with the large range of documented e-learning
situations, as learning machines. To the nascent methodology of
web science as a science could be added existent methodology in e-
learning, e.g., learner analytics as an analysis of observed properties
of social machines. Web science can be understood as the ‘whole’, a
‘home’ for much of e-learning, social sensing and cognitive
computation research. They are parts that integrate or coordinate to
strengthen the methodology, observational aspects, empirical
support, experimental tools, and style of intervention through en-
gineering, of an emergent science about technology-mediated hu-
man living; see (Arafat, 2011; Arafat et al., 2014) for a discussion of
the research questions that motivate such a science from the
perspective of the related disciplines of Information Science and
Retrieval, and (Arafat & Ashoori, 2017) for an extensive discussion
of this science.
The emergence of different application contexts are leading to
each of these disciplines to approach the other. It is the proposal of
this paper that e-learning scholars should proactively explore the
relationships with these other fields and appropriate concepts and
techniques to develop rigorous approaches for understanding and
measuring learning machines; the latter through further devel-
oping the conceptual foundations and methodology for learning
analytics.
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