It’s unfortunate that in higher education teaching often plays a distant second fiddle to research. Part of why I enjoy working with ISTE so much is because the organization connects me with a community of passionate educators throughout the world. Writing for ISTE Connects usually gives me an opportunity to focus on my time in the classroom, but this week I’m going to divert from my typical topics and try instead to mesh some original research with ed tech blogging.

For my most recent research, I’ve been playing around with IssueCrawler a new tool that facilitates online network crawls. IssueCrawler is a publicly available crawler system offered by the Amsterdam-based Govcom Foundation. The processing power for the tool is shared among the registered researchers using it, much like early mainframe computers shared processing power at the advent of the Internet. 

Crawler systems record and follow the hyperlinks from starting points (in this case a list of websites) indicated by the programmer. IssueCrawler, as its name implies, is particularly helpful in identifying networks of websites that all relate to a particular issue.

I have been busy graphing online social networks in interest areas such as parenting and health concerns, but I thought it might be interesting to launch a crawl that showed the online education blogging community. As a starting point to launch the crawl, I used all of the websites that received 2011 Edublog Awards. I ran a co-link analysis on these sites, which means that the crawler identifies and records only sites that are linked by at least two of the starting points. This filters out isolated sites and helps to ensure that crawls at larger depths maintain ties to the original network. Co-link analyses identify larger and larger neighborhoods of web pages for their linkage.

Here is the visualization of the online education blogger network that emerged [the dots represent websites and the arrows show links from one site to another]:

 
Click the network map to view larger image.

The education blogger network is densely interconnected and rich in online resources. We tend to be comfortable with social networking sites, particularly those that facilitate resource sharing such as Twitter, Flickr, Prezi and Slideshare. Education bloggers tend to be very supportive of other education bloggers and many links appear between individual and classroom blogs. Finally, we appear to depend on educators’ experience for content and information rather than education news from mainstream media.

Each week when I sit in on #edchat I am reminded of what a diverse network of individuals discuss education on the web. This network map is interesting, but remember it only shows a very general representation of the education blogger network. The content being created and shared by these bloggers is the true value of understanding and engaging in network exploration.
 
To aid in your own exploration, here’s a list of the websites that showed in the edublogger network map ranked by the number of inbound links:

1 - edublogs.org - 7673
2 - edublogawards.com - 7139
3 - help.edublogs.org - 5596
4 - 2kmand2kj.global2.vic.edu.au - 5580
5 - twitter.com - 5555
6 - yollisclassblog.blogspot.com - 5520
7 - jmsalsich.edublogs.org - 5251
8 - linkwithin.com - 5115
9 - postrank.com - 4413
10 - mravery.edublogs.org - 3815
11 - openthedoortob4.blogspot.com - 3601
12 - widgetbox.com - 3333
13 - biancasblog.global2.vic.edu.au - 3169
14 - edublogs.misd.net - 2918
15 - victoria-miriamsmoments.blogspot.com - 2882
16 - feedjit.com - 2799
17 - bellbulldogreaders.edublogs.org - 2790
18 - classroom20.com - 2687
19 - docs.widgetbox.com - 2634
20 - jadensawesomeblog.blogspot.com - 2590
21 - blogs.neisd.net - 2571
22 - voki.com - 2261
23 - studentchallenge.edublogs.org - 2243
24 - hannahshacienda.blogspot.com - 2239
25 - ourworldourstories.edublogs.org - 2157
26 - reformsymposium.com - 1703
27 - freetech4teachers.com - 1555
28 - primarytech.global2.vic.edu.au - 1430
29 - connectedprincipals.com - 1350
30 - larryferlazzo.edublogs.org - 1313
31 - jarrodsblog.global2.vic.edu.au - 1271
32 - dangerouslyirrelevant.org - 1158
33 - flickr.com - 1032
34 - davidwarlick.com - 1017
35 - ilearntechnology.com - 968
36 - rossmannell.com - 947
37 - edu.glogster.com - 853
38 - practicaltheory.org - 850
39 - mrswatson.ca - 819
40 - bbc.co.uk - 744
41 - sormid67.edublogs.org - 722
42 - angelamaiers.com - 607
43 - diigo.com - 579
44 - langwitches.org - 571
45 - wwwatanabe.blogspot.com - 532
46 - ning.com - 508
47 - voicethread.com - 502
48 - animoto.com - 490
49 - buildyourwildself.com - 489
50 - wordpress.com - 470
51 - stevehargadon.com - 463
52 - coolcatteacher.blogspot.com - 448
53 - vimeo.com - 445
54 - wordle.net - 394
55 - storybird.com - 371
56 - facebook.com - 297
57 - slideshare.net - 254
58 - weebly.com - 209
59 - edm310.blogspot.com - 191
60 - developers.facebook.com - 190
61 - teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org - 179
62 - wallwisher.com - 155
63 - ted.com - 141
64 - creativecommons.org - 135
65 - prezi.com - 124
66 - glogster.com - 124
67 - spellingcity.com - 122
68 - gmail.com - 122
69 - delicious.com - 88
70 - edmodo.com - 74
71 - evernote.com - 69
72 - youtube.com - 68
73 - iear.org - 50
74 - polleverywhere.com - 40
75 - iste.org - 39
76 - khanacademy.org - 37
77 - xtranormal.com - 35
78 - audacity.sourceforge.net - 35
79 - brainpop.com - 34
80 - teachertube.com - 24
81 - tagxedo.com - 23

Katie Stansberry authors the blog Teaching with Tech. She is the former community manager of ISTE Connects.