Social network analysis of students' participation and presence in a community of educational blogging

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report on an investigation of university students' participation and learning presence in a blogging activity, designed to support collaborative learning. There are three main reasons justifying the current research: to better understand the structure and the dynamics of students' blogging subgroups; to reveal students' patterns of engagement and their roles within the blogging community; and to evaluate the applicability of social network analysis (SNA) in studying students' performance and learning presence in educational blogs.Design/methodology/approachThe design of students' blogging activities was rooted on the ideas of authentic learning and followed a project‐based learning philosophy. Data analysis used methods of SNA to reveal collaborative aspects of students' engagement, the different roles undertaken by the students and the structure of the community within group blogs.FindingsSNA shed light into the different patterns of students' participation and the dynamics of students' learning presence within the community of group blogs. Research findings, both quantitative and qualitative, indicated that the majority of the students in the sample were generally active and exhibited learning presence actions within their group blog. Differences between students in the various groups were also recorded.Research limitations/implicationsThe study reported here is limited by the specific sample and the context of implementation. Future research will be directed towards applying the Community of Inquiry schema, in a way complimentary to SNA, to further analyse students' learning and cognitive presence in the community of the whole blogging project.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper concerns both the educational design of the blog‐based project activities and the use of SNA to reveal the different patterns of students' participation in educational blogging activities. Results could be of value for both educators and researchers in the field.

Online module login data as a proxy measure of student engagement: the case of myUnisa, MoyaMA, Flipgrid, and Gephi at an ODeL institution in South Africa

“…In this case, social networks tend to transition from being used for traditional purposes to being utilised to visualise student engagement data that are often represented in a static form by LMSs. Jimoyiannis, Tsiotakis, and Roussinos (2013) contend that social network analysis (SNA) is one of the effective tools for exploring student engagement patterns in OLEs. They also maintain that through SNA, engagement patterns can be presented in visual graphs.…”

English for Business: Student Responses to Language Learning Through Social Networking Tools

“…At this point many people are familiar with or have at least heard of e-mail, blogs, social networks, and wikis. A good number of publications have addressed their importance and have pointed out their value as informative and pedagogical tools (among others Jimoyiannis, Tsiotakis, & Roussinos, 2013;Morgan, 2012;Tilfarlioglu, 2011;Shih, 2013;Wang & Vasquez, 2012;Yakin & Tinmaz, 2015;Yu, Yuen, & Park, 2012).…”

Self-directed learning in e-portfolios: Analysing students’ performance and learning presence

“…Social Network Analysis provides a set of methods (algorithms) which give insight into the various e-learning situations in terms of network structure parameters, like interactions and ties among members, information exchange and knowledge sharing, group dynamics, community structure etc. [17,32]. In this paper we present the results of cohesion analysis, power (centrality) analysis and role analysis.…”

“…Power (centrality) analysis is an effective SNA method to measure network activity, to reveal the operation of the eportfolio community and to assess the impact each student had with respect to spreading information and influencing Self-directed learning in e-portfolio: Analysing students' performance and learning presences other students [17]. In-degree centrality represents the number of interactions a student receives from other members.…”

“…In this context, many researchers suggested that Web 2.0based learning environments are learner-centred by nature and they provide more control to the learners, in terms of engagement, peer interaction, content creation and collaboration [17,32,38]. In addition, Web 2.0 applications offer enhanced opportunities to the educators to consider new ways of designing and delivering their educational programs by a) extending learning environments from time and space bound classroom places, b) promoting openness and dynamic emergence of the courses, which are determined by students' needs, interests and individual learning initiatives, and c) adopting new forms of pedagogy which offer authentic learning opportunities through self-directed, participatory, collaborative and social learning processes [16,24].…”