Characterizing Teacher Connections in Online Social Media: A Case Study on Pinterest

Increasingly many teachers are turning to online social media to supplement educational resources and meet students' needs in the classrooms. The diffusion of information from online social media to the classroom is significantly faster than traditional curriculum-based approaches. However, this is contingent upon how well teachers across an online social media network are connected. To understand this, we perform a thorough and large-scale investigation of teacher connections in online social media, which is lacking in the literature. To make this feasible, we construct a large dataset of teachers on Pinterest, an image-based popular online social media. Our dataset includes 540 teachers across 5 states and 48 districts, thousands of connections they have established (either with their peers or some other Pinterest users), and all the resources they have shared in their accounts. Then, taking into account some crucial teacher-related attributes (e.g., their districts, grade levels, etc), we characterize direct and indirect teacher connections. Moreover, we compare the physical (face to face) and virtual (Pinterest) network of our surveyed teachers using several graph-related metrics. The finding in this study can serve as a basis to investigate teachers on social media in a deeper manner.