Essi Ryymin
essi.ryymin@edu.hel.fi
Media Centre of Helsinki City Education Department
P.O.Box 3010
00099 City of Helsinki
Objects of educational practises
digital projector
Networking relations of using ICTs within a teacher community
1
Essi Ryymin, 2Tuire Palonen, 3Kai Hakkarainen
1
Media Centre of Helsinki City Education Department
University of Turku, Department of Education, Educational Technology
Unit
3
University of Helsinki, Department of Psychology, Centre for Research
on Networked Learning and Knowledge Building
2
The purpose of the present study was to examine the network structure of
a teacher community related to the use of information and communication
technology (ICT). The study was carried out in an upper comprehensive
school in a suburban area of Helsinki, Finland. I
n the study, all 33 members of the school’s teacher
community took part, including 29 teachers, a principal, 2 school
assistants and a school secretary. The participants were asked to
respond to a Social Network Analysis (SNA) questionnaire designed to
assesses networking relations among the participants according to the
following five dimensions: 1) providing technical advice regarding ICT, 2)
providing pedagogical advice for using ICT, 3) collaboration regarding
web-based learning, 4) acquiring new knowledge or ideas of web-based
learning, 5) informal interaction between the members of the community.
In addition, the use of different kinds of media and teachers’ other
information sources were analyzed.
The results of the study indicated that the members of
the community differed in terms of ICT-related networks and informal
interaction. There were a few central actors in the community, who
dominated technical and pedagogical information exchange and to whom
their colleagues actively turned in their advice-seeking. Two of the
cognitively central actors represented hybrid expertise, a characteristic of
which was to merge technological and pedagogical expertise in using
ICTs in education.
These actors tended also to have their own external
networking relations that helped them to keep up their high level of
competence. The participants’ ICT-related egocentric network differed in
size and density. There were some actors central in the network of
informal interaction who were, simultaneously, peripheral in ICT-related
networking activities. On the other hand, the central actors of ICT were
not necessarily the socially central persons in the community. In the
analysis investigators identified four distinct, personal patterns of
networking, represented by four teachers; The Counsellor offers advice
actively without herself seeking information from colleagues; The Inquirer
is an active seeker of ICT-related information through capitalizing on her
social relations; The Collaborator engages in collaboration efforts of webbased learning by using several media; and The Weakly Social prefers
media rather than face-to-face contacts in his information seeking. Other
members of the teacher community were more or less mixtures of these
four types.
The use of media in relations of information exchange
of ICT was a complex phenomenon, which was strongly related to the
actors’ personal egocentric networks and the quality and the content of a
tie. The use of media explained members’ individual ways of carrying out
interaction with others, and the different kinds of actors appeared to have
personal media profiles. The results of the study indicate that SNA can
productively be applied to examine networking relations within a teacher
community.
Keywords: teacher community, information and communication
technologies, network structure, networking relations, social network
analysis, media use in networks