To Go Beyond ...: New Frontiers for Analyzing Social Networking Sites for Educational Policy and Practice

• In Event: 66.040 - Virtual Social Networks and Social Media: Shaping Teaching, Learning, and Policy Discourse

Abstract

There is an increasing need to develop and implement new, collaborative, approaches to educational policy and practice. Scholars such as Rhodes (2000) propose new, more dynamic network approach that focus on the informal, horizontal communication between actors, highlighting their interdependence in developing and implementing (educational) policies. Hattie (2013) found that teachers’ informal networks tend to be more effective than top-down interventions that are part of a larger and more formal professional development initiative. A growing number of studies indicate educational actors use social networking sites (SNS) as horizontal communication channels to keep current on news and share resources with colleagues (Risser, 2013) and in a sense accrue social capital. However, these studies remain ambiguous on how ideas and experiences are exchanged within SNS. Hence, the question arises as to whether SNS constitute a new frontier to collaborative communication processes on educational policy and practice.

We ground our work in the concept of social capital defined as “resources embedded in social relations and social structure which can be mobilized when an actor wishes to increase the likelihood of success in purposive action” (Lin, 2001, p. 24). Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) distinguish between three dimensions of social capital, namely a structural, cognitive and relational dimension. Focusing on the structural (social interactions) and cognitive (common understanding) dimensions of social capital the main goal of this study is to assess how collaborative communication processes in SNS can be characterized within the context of educational policy and practice. Moreover given that social capital can accrue this framework supports to our understanding of how informal networks develop and evolve over time.

SNA has been used to assess the structural dimension of social capital. We propose a new “influence metric”, which adapts already established networks metrics to better represent the nature of communication processes within SNS. As a result, we are able to determine four categories of participants, namely very passive, moderately passive, moderately active and very active.
We use bibliometric analyses to assess the cognitive dimension of social capital formation (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). Using natural language processing techniques and a “term frequency and weighting” algorithm (TF.IDF), we are able to compute and visualize any potential (dis)similarity between the contributions from the four categories.
We collected data from four international hashtag conversations amongst educational professionals on Twitter, namely #acps (USA), #edchatde (GER), #onderwijs2032 (NL) and #ukedchat (UK). The data was collected in NodeXL over a period of ten weeks. SNA and bibliometeric analysis took place in ‘R’.

Our results imply that social capital is accrued and that a number of individuals can attain central positions within their Twitter conversation network. Moreover, our proposed index is able to support understanding of the nature of an educational hashtag discussion (profiling discussions) and comparison across a (higher) number of hashtag discussions. These findings contribute to our understanding of how social capital theory can help to assess collaborative communication processes on educational policy and practice within SNS.

Authors

• Alan J. Daly, University of California - San Diego

• Martin Rehm, University of Duisburg-Essen

• Frank Cornelissen, University of Amsterdam