New Frontiers for Analyzing Social Networking Sites for Education Policy and Practice

• In Event: The Redefinition of Teacher Professionalism, Knowledge, and Practice in the 21st Century

Abstract

There is an increasing need to develop and implement new, collaborative, approaches to educational policy and practice. Scholars such as Rhodes (2000) propose a new, more dynamic network approach that focus on the informal, horizontal communication between actors, highlighting their interdependence in developing and implementing (educational) policies. A growing number of studies indicate educational actors use social networking sites (SNS) as horizontal communication channels to keep up-to-date and share resources with colleagues (e.g. Risser, 2013). 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 for collaborative communication processes on educational policy and practice.

We ground our work in the concept of social capital (Lin, 2002). Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) distinguish between three dimensions of social capital, namely a structural, cognitive and relational dimension. Focusing on the structural (social interactions) dimension 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.

The structural dimension of social capital is commonly assessed using social network analysis (Rehm & Notten, 2016). In this context, we first collected data on Twitter users, as an exemplary SNS, that have contributed selected hashtag conversations (Bruns & Stieglitz, 2013). Subsequently, we build directed unweighted 1-mode networks based on “Tweets”, “Mentions”, and “Replies to” matrices. Secondly, we computed the in-, out-, and overall degree centrality metrics of all users taking part in the applicable hashtag discussions. While these metrics provide valuable insights, we believe that they work better in an offline context, where the only chance to really access an individual’s knowledge and expertise are via direct contact. Moreover, one can wonder whether the concept of “periphery” also might have to be revisited. Periphery still correctly refers to a situation whereby an individual is not “actively” part of a discussion. But they can still observe and be a “passive” part of the discussion. Furthermore, considering the permeability of SNS, one can even think of situations, where an individual passively collects information from one space and transfers it into another space, where that person is then a key player. In order to account for these considerations, we therefore propose a new “social brokerage index” (SBI). We collected data from a US based hashtag conversation amongst educational professionals on Twitter, namely #observeme. The data was collected over a period of about 6 months. The SNA analysis took place within ‘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 SBI 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

• Martin Rehm, University of Duisburg-Essen

• Frank Cornelissen, University of Amsterdam

• Ad Notten

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