Multilevel Analysis of Uptake, Sessions, and Key Actors in a Socio-Technical Network

Learning in social settings is a complex phenomenon that involves multiple processes at individual and collective levels of agency. Thus, a richer understanding of learning in socio-technical networks will be furthered by analytic methods that can move between and coordinate analyses of individual, small group and network level phenomena. This paper outlines our implementation of an analytic framework intended to address these and other needs (e.g., integrating fragmented traces of activity into one analytic artifact), and gives an example using data from the Tapped In educator professional network. The methods build on empirical relationships between events to build a graph of uptake relations—how one event builds on another, which are then used to identify sessions in the space-time dimensions of a rich online environment, identify key actors within sessions using sociometrics, and find relationships between sessions that might be vectors for the transmission of ideas or practices.