Resources
As a team and with various collaborators, we have researched and written about social networks and social media in education. Here, we provide a list of select articles.
2023

Beyond sharing knowledge: Knowledge brokers’ strategies to build capacity in education systems
Journal of Professional Capital and Community
This study examines how knowledge brokers understand and discuss capacity building efforts in education systems (e.g., schools, districts, local education agencies). The findings illustrate how knowledge brokers employed context-specific strategies targeting whole systems instead of individuals to ensure that the organization and individuals within had the mindsets, capability, and conditions to engage and adapt the brokered knowledge and resources.
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Toward Knowledge Mobilization: Language as a Means to Convey Compatibility
Whether educators and policymakers mobilize and implement resources or new ideas depends on the degree to which they are perceived as compatible with their values, experiences, and needs. Pursuing a more nuanced understanding of the factors that make knowledge mobilization successful, this handout looks at how knowledge brokers leverage language to convey their resources' compatibility.
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Beyond Knowledge Brokers: Uncovering Resource Architects in knowledge mobilization
Individuals and organizations external to educational and policy systems— including academic research institutions, practice-based groups, and intermediary organizations— play a crucial role in generating, gathering, and interpreting evidence for wider distribution. Diving deeper into the characteristics of successful individuals and organizations working in these spaces, it is clear that “Knowledge broker” is inadequate for describing the scope, complexity, and importance of their work.
Read → Download2022

Refocusing the lens on knowledge mobilization: An exploration of knowledge brokers in education practice and policy
Journal of Education Policy and Management
Knowledge mobilization is a deeply relational process built on trust. This study examines the ways knowledge brokers share resources, values, beliefs, and practices by attending to the learning journeys and contexts of educators and policymakers.
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Literally Looking at Links – Mapping Communication and Content on X (Twitter)
Communications in Computer and Information Science
Social media offers teachers and other educational professionals the opportunity to engage into discussions and acquire social capital. This study uses social network analyses, latent semantic analysis, and web-scraping techniques to examine the underlying communication patterns in social media.
Read →2021

Exploring online social networks of school leaders in times of COVID-19
British Journal of Educational Technology
During the pandemic, school leaders turned to informal learning networks to rapidly share and collect information and reach out to their clusters. This study investigates the underlying network structures among school leaders, the type of information shared, and more. These findings provide valuable insights into who is moving what types of resources as part of the emerging governance approach on social media
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The social continuum of educational leadership: Exploring the offline and online social networks of elementary principals
The Elementary School Journal
This article investigates the informal sets of networks in both social media and face-to-face spaces in which elementary principals in an urban midsize public school district in the United States engage in the access, use, and diffusion of information. The findings are useful for practitioners and policymakers who would like to foster the (informal) professional development of educators.
Read →2020

Drinking from the firehose: The structural and cognitive dimensions of sharing information on X (Twitter)
American Journal of Education
Informal social networking sites, such as X (Twitter), can contribute to the continuous professional development of teachers by enabling them to share their ideas and collaboratively reflect on their practice. In this context, educational scientists have increasingly acknowledged that the concept of social capital can contribute to our understanding of how such networks develop and evolve over time. This study investigates the role of structural and cognitive social capital in the #observeme X (Twitter) conversation.
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Social media, education, and digital democratization
Teachers College Record
In this special issue, authors describe advocacy groups’ intentional organization and mobilization efforts to influence public opinion on education policy, as well as the relative influence of teachers’ collegial networks on their online curation of resources, and provide an in-depth look into one teacher’s efforts to supplement curriculum and meet her students’ needs. Each contributes uniquely to an emerging field of social media and education and relies on one or more of the components when examining big data.
Read →2019

Educational leadership in the X (Twitter)verse: Social media, social networks, and the new social continuum
Teachers College Record
Scholars increasingly recognize the importance of social processes involved in leading. Leadership has often been conceptualized as a process of influence toward an outcome. Social relationships through networks may provide leaders with the necessary infrastructure to access resources in achieving outcomes. Leadership from a network perspective, on the other hand, emphasizes the interdependence reflected by a network of ties, which may ultimately moderate, influence, or determine the activity and movement of practices and knowledge.
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