This week’s articles focused on social media designed for facilitation of various communities as well as some international perspectives on the Web 2.0 world. Horizon broadening and boundary spanning? You bet! And, if you are into Structural Equation Modeling and / or Hierarchical Linear Modeling studies, you are in for quite a treat!
“Tweet me, message me, like me”
(Goodyear, Casey, and Kirk, 2014)
This a two-year qualitative study involved investigating seven teachers from secondary schools in the UK as they engaged in changing their pedagogical approaches to physical education while relying on “digital consultant” who ultimately helped move the individuals from separate instructional experiences into becoming a community of practice. The data sources used for this study included 274 posts, 28 private messages, 12 page comments and 10 Likes from a shared Facebook page as well as 1577 tweets, 125 retweets, and 99 conversations on Twitter. From this data, the three themes of, “recognition, moral support, and extended professional learning” (Goodyear, Casey & Kirk, 2014, p. 6) emerged. The authors concluded by reflecting on how social media played a role in constructing this community of practice, and what role social media can and should play in both pedagogical change and research design.
This was certainly an interesting article, that also helped place our Community Observation Paper, Knowledge Sharing and Tracking Project, and Produsage Project into perspective. Certainly, the instructors in this study were part of a community, even if they didn’t know it at the beginning, but helpfully recognized it as such by the end. Each probably needed specific knowledge in order to transition their approach to physical education from where it had been to the model they were each working toward. Finally, the digital consultant in the middle was the main facilitator of produsage; by connecting these individuals together via Facebook and Twitter, they undoubtedly starting learning from each other and created products and strategies that none of them individually owned, but were collective developed and implemented. While the focus here was on secondary students, from the UK, with special attention paid to physical education pedagogy, examples such as this one inspire me to think about how these approaches and findings could be applied to American college students, in both student affairs and academic affairs settings.
Self-Reflection, Group-Reflection, Instructor-Supported Reflection, and Team Effectiveness
(Kim, Hong, Bonk, and Lim, 2011)
One of the shortcomings that plagues most of social science research is the lack of random selection and random assignment in our studies; we often have to rely on quasi experimental designs because we can’t (and even if we could, shouldn’t) randomly choose who to study and which groups to put them into. The inquiry into the relationship between group reflection variations and perceived team performance and effectiveness conducted by Kim, Hong, Bonk, and Lim (2011), is a great example of how social science research can use quasi-experimental designs to very closely approximate what our colleagues do in natural science research. The 38 Korean undergraduate online / offline hybrid students who participated in this study were randomly assigned to groups, which were also randomly assigned to conditions of reflections (self-, group-, or instructor-supported), as they completed the requirements of the course. Performance, participation, satisfaction, and team effectiveness were all measured at various points in the study. Ultimately, it was determined that the students in the Intsructor-Supported condition had the highest level of success, and this was interpreted to mean that, “…instructors should monitor and take part in [online students’] learning process” (Kim, Hong, Bonk, & Lim, 2011, p. 343).
This article had a significant number of strengths, including (but not limited to) the overall research design. Although the researchers didn’t have much control over who was in the course under study (after all, students select into coursework for a variety of reasons), they did leverage the experimental controls that were available to them by randomly sorting students into group and randomly assigning those groups into reflection conditions. I also appreciated the very deliberate argument that was made to justify the use of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) as the final analytic model; the researchers took great care in explaining how they conducted mean comparisons at both the mid- and ending-points of the course, and reported ANOVAs dependent-samples t-tests for the variety of performance metrics. It was interesting that they chose to not conduct regression analysis, but offered a beautiful explanation of their decision without being overly didactic:
Figure 2 represents the result and path model with TE measured at the midpoint of the project. The values on the path are standardized coefficients. A path coefficient is a standardized regression coefficient showing the direct effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable in the path model. Therefore, when Structural equation modeling (SEM) involves multiple causal variables, path coefficients are partial regression coefficients which measure the extent of effect of a variable on another in the path model controlling for other prior variables…(p. 341, emphasis added).
Full disclosure: I took a picture of this passage in the original text and sent it to a few friends so we could remember to use it later in case any of us ever need to write about our use of SEM.
As with the previously reviewed article, this study may have direct applicability to American college students; certainly the sample used here were undergraduate students, but it would be interesting to see if these findings hold up with American students, especially those working in primarily face-to-face groups.
Discussion Network Heterogeneity, Civic Engagement, Personality Traits, and Social Media (Oh My!)
(Kim, Hsu, and Zuniga, 2013)
In my role as Graduate Research Assistant, I work for an office that used to have the term “Civic Engagement” in its name. That, coupled with the fact that I have a degrees in Psychology (at both the undergraduate and graduate level), I was super-excited to read a study that combined so many elements that I had become familiar with over a long period of time. This is one of the few studies I have read in my program that used a large national dataset, and perhaps the only one in which it was used as an original source; plenty of article use large, nationally-representative secondary sources, but the fact that this investigation didn’t was noteworthy right from the start. Although the final sample (1,159) was much smaller than the original sample (10,000) and suffered from the same limitations as many other survey-based studies (mostly White, mostly female, mostly middle-class) the researchers did a good job of explaining how their data still had validity. The two dependent variables studied, discussion network heterogeneity and civic engagement, were described in great detail, as were the independent variables of interest (social media use, extraversion, and openness) and the control variables (age, gender, race, education, income, news media use, political efficacy, and political partisanship). Results of the analyses, which included hierarchical modeling for each of the outcomes of interest (with interaction terms (!)), demonstrated that social media use was significantly and positively related to discussion network heterogeneity and civic participation, that extraversion was significantly and negatively related to discussion network heterogeneity and that Openness was not significantly related to discussion network heterogeneity. Additionally, “…results showed that the interaction term between social media use and openness was significant [in the model predicting civic engagement]. After the control, openness to experience was found to significantly and negatively moderate the relationships between respondents’ social media use and their participation in civic activities.” (p. 509).
The authors of this study are certainly to be commended for the rigor with which they approached this study. Not only was it ambitious to go after original national survey data, but to analyze two outcomes, both with hierarchical linear models, using interaction terms, is a level of academic inquiry I continue to aspire toward. I was somewhat disappointed that of the “Big Five” personality traits, they chose to only study Openness and Extraversion, leaving out Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. I’m sure it was just one of many painful sacrifices they had to make in order to complete their project in a timely fashion, but hopefully their future work will focus on personality traits in addition to the ones selected here.
Georgia on My Mind
(Noniashvili, Batiashvili, and Griffin, 2014)
I don’t think Noniashvili, Batiashvili, and Griffin (2014) were writing about the same place Ray Charles was singing about. However, the authors should be quite proud of themselves to have an article in the first issue of the first volume of their intended journal (see full citation). Getting published at all is quite an accomplishment; being one of the articles to launch a new publication is quite another.
Largely descriptive, the authors attempted to explain how the Republic of Georgia, despite being one of the oldest human civilization, grapples with the modern issues related to social media, consumerism, and academic freedom, against the larger backdrop of Western countries, like the US, who have been at this for quite a while (relatively speaking). Focusing mainly on social media as a means of promoting commerce, the authors provide some descriptive statistics related to consumer social media behaviors, but quickly shift gears to a discussion of academic freedom and comparisons of security, privacy, and regulation in the republic versus those in the US. Ultimately, the authors argued that future research should focus on leveraging social media to help the Republic of Georgia create and maintain a greater e-commerce presence on a global scale, and longitudinal studies focused on academic freedom and social media.
At first, the focus in this article seemed scattered between commerce concerns and academic issues, but learning that the authors are 1) a PhD student in a School of Business, 2) a Full Professor and Dean of a Business School and 3) and Associate Professor and Director of External Business Programs in a School of Graduate and Professional studies, it all made sense. In many qualitative articles, the authors are expected to (and are many times encouraged to) “situate” themselves as researchers to help provide context and problematize bias in their reporting. Had the authors of this article done this upfront, I think the rest of their piece would have been easier to follow. While the concerns raised are certainly interesting, a clearly delineation of how they were related (other than both involving social media) would have been helpful, and may have ultimately resulted in the production of two manuscripts instead of one. If the researchers continue along this line of inquiry, I could this body of knowledge culminating in a very interesting book.
Well, dear reader, that’s about 1800 words of my thinking this week. What were your thoughts on the articles you’ve read recently? Did you also pick the same optional article, or did you select a different one? Did you come across any interesting findings or methods? Let me know in the comments below!
This post references:
Goodyear, V. A., Casey, A., & Kirk, D. (2014). Tweet me, message me, like me: Using pedagogical change within an emerging community of practice. Sport, Education and Society, 1 – 17.
Kim, P., Hong, J., Bonk, C., & Lim, G. (2011). Effects of group reflection variations in project-based learning integrated in a Web 2.0 learning space. Interactive Learning Environments, 19(4), 333 – 349.
Kim, Y., Hsu, S., & Zuniga, H. (2013). Influence of social media use on discussion network heterogeneity and civic engagement: The moderating role of personality traits. Journal of Communication, 63, 498 – 516.
Noniashvili,M., Batiashvili, M., and Griffin, G. (2014). The use of social media in the Republic of Georgia and a discussion about American academic freedom with electronic communications. Journal of Eastern European and Central Asian Research, 1(1), 1 – 8.
Top Image Credit: Pixabay.com (https://pixabay.com/p-413157/?no_redirect)
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