Examining a one‐hour synchronous chat in a microblogging‐based professional development community

Abstract

Research on microblogging in education has suggested its potential to promote community building and collaborative learning, but little is known about the nature of interaction in such microblogging communities. More research is needed to understand how online learning communities can be designed in a way that supports effective learning. The purpose of the study is to explore how people interact in a popular microbloggingbased learning community by examining a one-hour synchronous chat event and analyzing its network structure, levels of participation, major topics generated and types of interaction. The findings suggested that the levels of participation in the synchronous chat were largely uneven. During the chat, participants were engaged in many types of interaction and discussed a variety of issues related to the topic. Interestingly, people who were different in their levels of participation also varied on the types of topics generated, but not on the types of interaction. IntroductionThe importance of social interaction and networks to learning has been widely recognized by educational researchers (Brown & Adler, 2008;Dawson, 2010), and the development of webbased technology facilitates and intensifies such communication and interaction. Social networking and microblogging sites such as Twitter enable users from around the world to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously, sharing information and exchanging opinions. Researchers have recognized that social interaction afforded by microblogging is critical for community building and collaborative learning (Ebner, Lienhardt, Rohs & Meyer, 2010). The nature of such social interaction, however, has yet to be fully investigated or understood. A review of research on microblogging in education suggests that few studies have investigated the patterns of learner interactions within microblogging-based online learning communities (Gao, Luo & Zhang, 2012), and the question of how participants interact and learn in such microblogging communities still needs to be answered. More research is needed to develop an in-depth understanding of such online communities, which may offer insights on how to foster online learning communities that support effective learning. The study aims at extending our understanding of microblogging-based learning communities by examining a one-hour synchronous chat session

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