Section 1: Overview of Complex Systems and Social Networks

• In Event: Social Network Analysis Workshop: A Complex Systems Approach to Examining Collaboration

Abstract

We draw upon a complex systems perspective to demonstrate how social network analysis can be used to evaluate the structure and quality of collaboration and other human learning systems. Systems thinking has been integrated into research and evaluation literature (Ekboir, et al., 2017; Hummelbrunner, 2011; Williams & Imam, 2007), and social network analysis has gained popularity as a research and evaluation technique. Burgeoning research operationalizes collaboration as a complex phenomenon that emerges between people, or as a dynamical form of energized interaction (Jarvela et al., 2016), including group-level phenomenon such as information exchange, shared goals, and adaptive group processes. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the individual and group level approaches complement each other, representing ontologically distinct levels of analysis in engagement research. This type of multi-level, emergent relationship between micro (individual) and macro (group) levels of human behavior is the hallmark of complex systems (CS) research in education (Hilpert & Marchand, 2018). These CS principles are reflected in a variety of research on collaborative human systems in education, including science-of-team-science approach to understanding how humans, objects, and texts form emergent networks that produce new knowledge (Borner, et al., 2010; Fortunado, et al., 2018).

Network analysis is an appropriate methodological technique for observing and measuring multi-level approaches to collaborative humans systems from a CS perspective because of its focus on modeling both individual attributes and the relationships between people, simultaneously assessing endogenous and exogenous effects (Sweet, 2016). Network analysis allows researchers to examine how individual-level action shapes the group-level action (bottom up), and how group-level behaviors shapes individual behaviors (top down). This workshop will contribute to participant understanding of social networks by demonstrating how to evaluate and research the network structure of collaboratives, bridging the emergent relationship between actors and network level outcomes.

Author

• Gwen C. Marchand, University of Nevada - Las Vegas