Networked society and applications in education

A book-Networked: The new social operating system- (Rainie & Wellman, 2012) addressed diverse perspectives and characteristics in society.

The authors explain the way to be connected to each other from door-door to person - person. With the advent of the Internet, people do not need to make physical connections. Instead, they became  'networked' on the web. Person-person networks show how community has transcended group boundaries (support, sociability, information, and a sense of belonging). -- Not toward social isolation, but toward flexible autonomy. I liked a description of the understanding of communities. The authors said "communities as fluid personal networks, rather than as static neighborhood or family groups." 

However, I wondered how they create support, sociability, information, and a sense of belonging under the fluid and weak tied networks in educational settings.

In terms of networks and learning, Simens (2005) said: “Learning is connection building and network creation.” In the same vein, a recent study about Personal Social Knowledge Network (PSKN) in cMOOCs focused on the learners' connectivist interactions (watch, share, reflect, collaboration, and innovation). They used social network analysis method to identify interactions and reported that the high-performing learners show deeper knowledge interaction and social communication in addition to simple knowledge sharing and social communication. Additionally, as time passed and the PSKN of high-performing learners extended further, their interaction behavior became more complex and their role had gradually changed from “learning” to “teaching” as well as from knowledge acceptance to knowledge creation in cMOOCs. 

From the result of the book and the article, I thought further relationships between ties and connectivist interactions in teachers' professional learning networks. Teachers participate in the professional networks spontaneously and they make ties sharing information and social support. Rainie and Wellman (2012) said the ties would be diverse and connectivist interactions significantly predicted learning performances. Then, how about the relationships between social support and connectivist interaction on knowledge? How we can explain relationships among social bonding, interaction, and outcome?  

References

Duan, J., Xie, K., Hawk, N. A., Yu, S., & Wang, M. (2019). Exploring a Personal Social Knowledge Network (PSKN) to aid the observation of connectivist interaction for high‐and low‐performing learners in connectivist massive open online courses. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(1), 199-217.