At the Summer KM Cluster event in San Francisco, I came across the application of social network analysis to the education field. Whereas it originally was used to help organizations understand their employees' interrelationships and serve as a predictor of organizational performance, researchers have taken it to the next level. Analysis of an employee's network can help predict individual performance.
The natural next step among researchers was to analyze students' networks as an approach to predict student performance. However, I am more intrigued by the idea of using social network analysis as a predictor of school performance. It would be fascinating to see how the interrelationships among school administrators, teachers, parents, community members, and students could affect the overall performance of a school. I have yet to locate specific research in this area, but I am sure I cannot be the first one to have thought of this.
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