Competency 4.2

Competency 4.2: Describe and interpret the results of social network analysis for the study of learning.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been widely adopted as a scientific and empirical tool to understand the characteristics and habitat of a social environment.  Its various metrics represent insights to the behaviour of its constituents and thus the community as a whole.

In the context of a learning environment, inferences could be drawn from the respective SNA metrics as follows:

Homophily

• It could be interpreted as the similarity of the learners profile within a cluster (group) versus the others (e.g. age, race, gender, majors, etc.)

Multiplexity

• It could be interpreted as the strength (cohesiveness) of the relationship between two learners within the learning network.

Mutuality

• It could be interpreted as the extent to which two learners reciprocate each other in their learning interactions.

Closure

• It could be used to understand when one learner is having another learner as friend, to what extent this relationship could be transit to another learner(s).

Propinquity

• It could be interpreted as the impact of geographic proximity is having on the degree of learning interactions.

Bridge

• It could be seen as a measure of an individual learner filling a “structure hole” (absence of ties) of a learning network.

Centrality

• There is a good set of measurements around this metrics (e.g. “betweenness”, “closeness”, etc.) which intend to describe the influence of a particular learner to the community.

Density

• It could be interpreted as the cohesiveness of the learners within the community and the frequency of learning interactions therein.

Distance

• It could be seen as the length of the path where information is transmitted within the learning community.

Strength

• It could be seen as the intensity of the relationship and interactions amongst learners within the community.

Clustering Coefficient

• It could be interpreted as the likelihood of two learners are associated with each other.