Analyzing Social Media And Learning Through Content And Social Network Analysis: A Faceted Methodological Approach

Abstract

In just a short period of time, social media have altered many aspects of our daily lives, from how we form and maintain social relationships to how we discover, access and share information online. Now social media are also affecting how we teach and learn. In this paper, we discuss methods that can help researchers and educators evaluate and understand the observed and potential use of social media for teaching and learning through content and network analyses of social media texts and networks. This paper is based on a workshop given at the 2014 Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference, and presents an overview of the measures and potential of a multi-method approach for studying learning via social media. The theoretical discussion is augmented with study of the case of Twitter discussion from a cMOOC class.