Analyzing Social Media And Learning Through Content And Social Network Analysis: A Faceted Methodological Approach

Abstract

In just a short period of time, social media have altered many aspects of our daily lives, from how we form and maintain social relationships to how we discover, access and share information online. Now social media are also affecting how we teach and learn. In this paper, we discuss methods that can help researchers and educators evaluate and understand the observed and potential use of social media for teaching and learning through content and network analyses of social media texts and networks. This paper is based on a workshop given at the 2014 Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference, and presents an overview of the measures and potential of a multi-method approach for studying learning via social media. The theoretical discussion is augmented with study of the case of Twitter discussion from a cMOOC class.

The Marginal Syllabus: Educator Learning and Web Annotation Across Sociopolitical Texts and Contexts

“…We identified three different types of learning analytics; descriptive statistics, social networks, and kernel density estimations were all means of studying Marginal Syllabus participants as learners and online texts as learning contexts "for the purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs" (Siemens, 2012, p. 4). The first phase of our analysis echoed other digital media and learning researchers who have examined open data and online interaction as forms of learning analytics (Gruzd, Paulin, & Haythornthwaite, 2016;Shum & Ferguson, 2012). The second phase of our analysis applied discourse analysis methods to a selection of annotation content.…”

“…Our use of open-source software to analyze data from an open-source technology was intentional given the political and equity-oriented stance of this research project. Third, while content analysis methods can describe some features of online "communal textual discourse" (Gruzd et al, 2016), we embraced more semantically nuanced and situated discourse analysis methods (Gee, 2011) to discern how educators' annotation content evidenced political dimensions of talk in Marginal Syllabus conversation. As illustrated by our use of KDE to identify areas of subsequent discourse analysis, our approach synthesized quantitative and automated analysis of open metadata with qualitative and inductive analysis of educator's public discourse.…”

“…Our analysis was performed on the Jupyter platform using the Python programming language and the pandas library (pandas is an open-source library that structures data for analysis and visualization). Because Python is a general purpose programming language, we were able to build the ancillary workflows needed to collect, format, and visualize annotation metadata as a form of learning analytic (e.g., Gruzd, Paulin, & Haythornthwaite, 2016). These steps were packaged into a single Jupyter notebook and automated to identify descriptive statistics, conduct social network analysis (SNA), and create kernel density estimation (KDE) visualizations.…”

Learning within Digital Media: Investigating the Relationships Between Student Citation Networks, Assignment Structures, and Learning Outcomes

“…Future work will examine other network-level measures such as diameter, centralization and modularity as well as node-level centrality measures that have also proven useful in the learning [33] and community building [34,35] contexts. Also, from the data collection perspective, this study would be difficult (i.e.…”

Learning in the Wild: Coding Reddit for Learning and Practice

“…Within this field, there is a growing area of research on social learning analytics. Research approaches such as conversation analysis, natural language processing and social network analysis are brought into play to gain an understanding of online social learning processes [4,16]. Work in social learning analytics is in its formative stages, and is challenged by the multiple ways to approach open, online learning.…”