A critical view towards Social Network Analysis in education

I’m starting to write about my PhD research in my blog. Even though I have colleagues who blog about their research, such as Riina Vuorikari, and I’m one of the leading social media experts in Finland, it just hasn’t occured to me to combine these two activities. Maybe it’s about time.

Already during my educational psychology studies I was introduced to the solution psychologists use to study collaborative learning scenarios. Since psychologists traditionally study one brain at a time, analysing a group of people is not very easy. The solution is to use the old sociological method Social Network Analysis (SNA) to study the interaction patterns within the group. The only problem is that most psychologists aren’t familiar with how SNA is supposed to be used, and use it in very naïve ways.
I decided to study this issue in my master’s thesis (in Finnish: Sosiaalisen verkostoanalyysin soveltuminen yhteisöllisen verkko-oppimisen tutkimiseen), where I studied 23 classrooms and over 400 pupils as they used the Fle3 learning environment in a progressive inquir
y learning process. I took a critical look at the SNA metrics most educational SNA studies had used, and tried to see whether or not they had any bearing in the results.
As I expected, some SNA metrics were irrelevant, while others were in fact contrary to what many studies assumed. I republished the results in a peer-reviewed article The Applicability of Social Network Analysis to the Study of Networked Learning published in the Journal of Interactive Learning Environments, in October 2009. Anyone using SNA to look at educational settings might want to take a look at its results.
I’ll blog about the key findings in future posts, and talk about the new studies I’m involved in.