ראי ראי שעל הקיר, מי מצייץ ומי משפיע בעיר? קהילת ידע מקצועית בטכנולוגיות למידה בטוויטר - ניתוח רשתות

Professional communities of practice have moved recently from forums to
social networks platforms. This paper investigates an Israeli professional
community of people working or studying the field of Educational /
Information Technologies and using Twitter to connect with similar others.
The activities of 42 users and 296 edges among them until October 2011
were analyzed in terms of user investments (i.e., participation by tweeting
and following others) and gratifications (i.e., influence on the audience: the
degree of centrality into the community network measured by the PageRank,
number of followers, and tweets marked as favorites). All the hypotheses
were supported: (1) The evolution of the community was consistent with the
Diffusion of Innovations Model (Rogers, 2003). (2) Six participants (14.3%)
produce about 80% of the tweets. (3) Level of investment onto the
community through tweeting and following others is highly gratified by
influence on the audience, especially by the "social" influence measures –
number of followers, and number of tweets marked as favorites. However,
medium correlations are found between participation and influence hidden
from the participants – the degree of centrality into the community network
measured by PageRank. Future studies may use qualitative methods in order
to explore reasons for not using Twitter or using it on different levels for
professional purposes, as well as investigate the quality of massive
attendance to others.