Abstract

A SUPER Network/ELPEC Group lunchtime seminar.

Teachers are increasingly expected to engage into ongoing professional development, in order to ensure the continued provision of high quality education. In this context, social networking sites (SNS) provide them with an environment, where they can collaboratively acquire and share new information within diverse groups of people.

In this context, social capital theory has been proposed as valuable perspective to analyse the exchange of information within SNS . Yet, past studies remain inconclusive about the role of social capital. Furthermore, little is known about whether and how teachers use SNS to share and collect information. The present study uses a multi-method approach, employing social and semantic networks analysis to assess the underlying structure of the conversation.

The study thereby contributes to the discussion about social capital within SNS and provides tentative evidence on how differing “investment behaviour” among users can lead to different payoffs in terms of social capital within SNS .

Martin Rehm is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Learning Lab (University Duisburg-Essen). He received his PhD from Maastricht University (The Netherlands), where he investigated the impact of hierarchical positions on Communities of Learning. His current research focus is on informal learning with social media. In his work, he departs from social capital theory and employs a multi-method approach, using social and semantic network, as well as bibliometric analyses.