SeNA: Modelling Socio-spatial Analytics on Homophily by Integrating Social and Epistemic Network Analysis

Abstract

Homophily is a fundamental sociological theory that describes the tendency of individuals to interact with others who share similar attributes. This theory has shown evident relevance for studying collaborative learning and classroom orchestration in learning analytics research from a social constructivist perspective. Emerging advancements in multimodal learning analytics have shown promising results in capturing interaction data and generating socio-spatial analytics in physical learning spaces through computer vision and wearable positioning technologies. Yet, there are limited ways for analysing homophily (e.g., social network analysis; SNA), especially for unpacking the temporal connections between different homophilic behaviours. This paper presents a novel analytic approach, Social-epistemic Network Analysis (SeNA), for analysing homophily by combining social network analysis with epistemic network analysis to infuse socio-spatial analytics with temporal insights. The additional insights SeNA may offer over traditional approaches (e.g., SNA) were illustrated through analysing the homophily of 98 students in open learning spaces. The findings showed that SeNA could reveal significant behavioural differences in homophily between comparison groups across different learning designs, which were not accessible to SNA alone. The implications and limitations of SeNA in supporting future learning analytics research regarding homophily in physical learning spaces are also discussed.