Interpreting Your SNA Diagram

SNAPP will automatically analyse the discussion forum data on the page you select and display the patterns of connections between the nodes of the network as a network diagram. There’s no set interpretation of a social network diagram as this is highly context-dependent. However, different patterns can indicate different online behaviour, and represents the way participants are interacting, when taken together with the context. Make meaningful interpretations of the activities and learning occurring within your online course/ unit. To help give some guidance in interpreting the network diagrams, firstly we go through some terminology and then some examples.

Some Basic Social Networking Terminology

Figure 1: Example SNAPP sociogram

Figure 1 above, is a social network analysis (SNA) diagram or sociogram. It represents individuals through nodes (red circles in the example here) and interactions between individuals as a line with an arrow to indicate the direction of the interaction (called a link). In most cases, the nodes and the links can be re-sized to reflect the amount of interactions or different attributes. For example, an individual with a high number of interactions may be represented by a larger node; and a high frequency of interactions between individuals may be indicated with a thicker link.

Learning Management Systems display discussion forum activity by thread (or discussion topic). This is useful when posting to the forum, but it is difficult to see how students are interacting and what kinds of networks are forming. SNAPP represents this information - on who posted and replied to whom, and how much - as a Social Network Diagram such as the one above. Because every group of interactions is different, every network diagram is going to look different, so this section explains what kinds of networks you might see and what the patterns might indicate.

Examples

Figures 2a and 2b: Example A and Example B representing different discussion forum posts

The above example illustrates two different discussion forums, both with 14 posts and 4 participants. Although they look very similar, they reveal different interactions when SNAPP analyses the postings. For instance, in the first forum, Aneesha is brokering the information, supplying information to the students A, B and C, and answering individual questions. In the next example, Aneesha is now supplying a lot of information to Student A, some to Student C and students are beginning to interact more between each other.

In this second example, also with small numbers, two different forums (above) are analysed by SNAPP – to reveal two very different sets of interaction.

The first forum (example C) represents a more question/answer, instructor-mediated model; there is a clear information broker in the middle and little to no interaction between other participants. The second forum (example D) is almost the opposite – there are three separate groups discussing between themselves, but little cross-over of information (granted, the information in discussion forums is available to all to read). Depending on the intentions of the discussion activity, this can tell the facilitator/ instructor about how their implemented discussion activities are going. For example, the diagrams above might confirm the instructor’s intent (for example, if they were responding in a Q & A forum in example C or set some small group work in D), or it may reveal additional information that wasn’t immediately obvious looking at the forum text.

Figure 3: Instructor mediated discussion

In Figure 3, the largest node is in fact the instructor, and the instructor is the most active participant. Although students are also discussing amongst themselves, there is a lot of interaction directly related to the instructor. In this particular case, the instructor was aiming to develop a community of sharing among the learners – and this does appear to be developing, despite the current reliance on the instructor. This kind of network shape is often indicative of the beginning of a semester of a course which is encouraging students to engage with each other. While students are still getting to know each other, they can be still finding their way around and the instructor may still be heavily involved in introducing topics for discussion, clarifying issues, and building student confidence, etc. The instructor in this case made some changes to her facilitation of the forum to be more in line with her goal of having a student lead community. By monitoring the discussion activity using SNAPP the instructor can see how her learning interventions are working (and this is also a nice way to demonstrate reflective teaching in a portfolio).