I’m developing a research interest in social network analysis; specifically, I’m interested in the way that learning takes place on these networks, specifically within social movements, howsoever broadly defined. I think there are some really interesting areas to explore related to what we mean when we discuss learning in these social movements, who is ‘teaching’ whom (if teaching is even the right word), and what they are learning. In particular, I’m interested in the mechanics of that learning – that is, how does learning take pace across and through social networks.
The central part that interests me in this case is related to the relationships that exist between nodes in the network. Unfortunately, based on my reading thus far, this appears to be the most challenging area to gather data on – and, perhaps not unrelatedly, it is also the least researched aspect. Previous studies of social networks have examined posts (I use posts here to indicate individual additions to the network, whether they be tweets on Twitter, or posts of words or images on Facebook or Instagram or their equivalent on other social networks) either individually, or a corpus of aggregated tweets. However, I think this focus might obscure or ignore some of the most important aspects of learning – the relationships that exist between the nodes on the network. For example, a reply to a tweet has a different semantic purpose to a tweet itself, and should be considered differently because of that.
Another aspect of this research is what data is collected. For the most part, the study has focused on the textual element of posts. More recently, this has started to include specific elements of that text, such as hashtags, and how they are used to indicate meaning. Few studies (although by no means none) have either examined images, or sought to combine all of the elements of a post into one multi-modal data point to be analysed.
The other aspect is related to the challenge of researching in the informal learning space. There have been a number of studies that have explored the use of social networks as related to formal learning – most notable Siemens and the cMOOC in 2011, but less so in relation to informal learning – although that appears to be changing – for example Kumar and Gruzd (2019).