Dr. Eric Hogan from Georgia Southern University presented on one-mode networks and classroom management at the 2020 Lilly Conference online. Hogan is faculty in the Education Department and teaches on learning, motivation, and assessment. I didn’t know about one-mode networks and, while I have seen a couple network analysis studies in education, I had not considered the connection with classroom management practices. It makes sense: network analysis can help inform who works well together, who starts productive discussions, who interacts with others… how are members of the community interacting and who is being left out. Hogan mentioned how social network analysis can help address bullying in elementary education. Social network analysis was defined by Hogan as both a tool and a method that uses visualization techniques to empirically understand relationships. Hogan focused on one-mode datasets focuses on people to people connections within a network. Whole networks could include classrooms, since they encompass an intact group. Hogan asks a class: who do you know and who do you interact with to then create an Excel file to later visualize: 1s and 0s are used to show connections or lack of connections, respectively. Network analysis includes: size of the network, its composition (groups, cliques, categories), and structure of the network (how dense or open/closed is the network). One example Hogan gave from another network analysis expert is that both “live” and “evil” have the same composition but very different implications. Hogan then displayed several network visualizations with lines connecting the names of participants, often using different colors or shapes for participants representing different categories (programs, degree, age). In three or four examples from actual classrooms, Hogan depicted different sizes and densities of the networks. Degree centrality is the number of connections that a person has: who has the most connections… and could have a lot of influence. Closeness centrality or how close are you to others in the network. I appreciate how Hogan always returned to the idea of sharing resources or influencing classroom dynamics and how to manage these interactions/scenarios. Also, it brings into my mind teamwork and the sense of a community of inquiry: if people are being left out we may have equity issues to consider. The arrangement of a physical classroom can influence dynamics; further, network analysis can inform classroom seating and group assignments. What about in the online setting? How do we manage and improve interactions? One thought was the use of social annotation tools to collaboratively annotate texts using Hypothes.is, for example. I wonder what we could do to prompt more interactions by showing students their network of responses and annotations? Would this help improve interactions? We’ve been learning from Remi Kalir and the Hypothes.is team about cool analytics. Actually Lauren R. presented a poster today at SENCER on the Delftia Wikipedia and Annotation project! I can’t wait to dig deeper into this and network analysis while also keeping in mind how to improve classroom interactions.
