Abstract
Online social networks are popular venues for computer-supported collaborative work and computer-supported collaborative learning. Professionals within the same discipline, such as software developers, often interact over various social network sites for knowledge updates and collective understandings. The current study aims at gathering empirical evidences concerning gender differences in online social network beliefs and behaviors. A total of 53 engineering postgraduate students were engaged in a blogging community for collaborative learning. Participants’ beliefs about collaboration and nature of knowledge and knowing (i.e. epistemological beliefs) are investigated. More specifically, social network analysis metrics including in-degree, out-degree, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality are obtained from an 8-interval longitudinal SNA. Methodologically speaking, the current work puts forward mixed methods of longitudinal SNA and quantitative beliefs survey to explore online social network participants’ beliefs and behaviors. The study’s findings demonstrate significant gender differences in collaborative learning through online social networks, including (1) female engineering postgraduate students engage significantly more actively in online communications, (2) male engineering postgraduate students are more likely to be the potential controllers of information flows, and (3) gender differences exist in belief gains related to social aspects, but not individual's epistemic aspects. Overall, participants in both genders demonstrated enhanced beliefs in collaboration as well as the nature of knowledge and knowing.
Highlights
Online social networks (OSNs) have changed the way in which knowledge is constructed and shared
Measures Participants’ beliefs were measured by 5 scales: Collaboration adopted from the Collaborative Knowledge Building (CKB) Questionnaire developed by Chan and Chan (2011) and measured collaboration and knowledge building; Certainty of knowledge, Justification, Source of knowledge, and Attainment of truth adopted from Hofer's (2000) epistemological beliefs (EB) measurement
With reference to the metrics corresponding to the longitudinal development of the OSN emerged (Fig. 2a - 2d), one can observe the following trends: (1) female participants are likely to be associated with greater in-degree, out-degree, and closeness centrality than their male counterparts do at all times, and (2) the blog behavior of male participants’ reveals greater betweenness centrality than their female counterparts do most of the time
Summary
Online social networks (OSNs) have changed the way in which knowledge is constructed and shared. Twitter, and blogs are examples of popular online venues for knowledge exchange and social interaction. These platforms provide affordances for collective knowledge through collaboration across temporal and spatial boundaries. There are different kinds of online communities which aim at dynamic knowledge exchange and sharing, such as the blogging communities of academic researchers and the question-and-answer type of forums, e.g., Yahoo! The current work aims at collecting empirical evidences about gender differences in OSNs as a collaborative learning environment. Pretest and posttest quantitative surveys were conducted to provide additional evidences concerning beliefs change related to collaborative learning upon OSN participation
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