How to Design And Improve Education By Social Media Messages Analysis:

An Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Teachers’ Case

Abstract

In this study Information and Communications Technology (ICT) teachers’ social media
messages were analyzed in terms of problem areas and message purposes who teach in
Turkish Middle Schools in order to improve education by teachers own statements in social
media platforms. In the research the messages were analyzed in terms of problem areas as
categories of employee rights and job definition, compulsory courses, curriculum
deficiency, innovations, infrastructure and support. It was seen that employee rights and job
definition (f=61, %33.2) was the most important subject than other categories. Then comes
in order as compulsory courses (f=40, %23,2), curriculum deficiency (f=28, %16.2),
innovations (f=23, %13.3), infrastructure and support (f=21, %12.1). When the purposes of
messages of ICT teachers were analyzed it was seen that sharing (f=50, %29.0) was the most
important purpose. Then comes in order as reporting problems (f=43, %24.8), offering
solutions (f=32, %18.4), announcements (f=20, %11.5), exemplify (f=16, %0.92), and
starting an action (f=12, %0.71).

Keywords: social media, social networks, ICT teachers, message analysis.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) affects the daily life of people and the
workflow of institutions, and corporations. Information and Communications Technologies play a
crucial role and shape the every part of our world. Information and Communications
Technologies are most frequently used in education, banking, e-commerce, logistics, automotive,
space and health sectors. Educational societies demand effectiveness in education. So the
interaction among people has brought highest point sharing and collaboration. New technologic
systems, learning-teaching processes, educational media, educational program design methods and
social media platforms show themselves as the power of human in the education.

Social media platforms are essential information resources with a wide range of users, messages
and applications. With the continuous emergence of new technological developments and
innovations teachers need to be better prepared and consider new approaches in order to bring
better information and communication technology skills into their classrooms. Social
media is a platform for people to use for communications for any purpose. Widely recognized
popular social media types include, blogs, micro-blogs, social networking services, content
sharing, discussion sites, and virtual worlds. Thus, social media comprises of activities that involve
socializing and networking online through words, pictures and videos (Solis, 2008).

This study aims to state and interpret Information and Communications Technology (ICT) teachers’
social media messages for the problem areas and message purposes in order to define the problems
and propose solutions by the ICT teachers’ own discourses. Thus, the messages were obtained from
social media sites, categorized, and ICT teachers’ suggested improvements were declared. And the
purposes of the messages were defined and declared as well.

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Literature Review

New learning environments have been created and educational institutions have encouraged their
staff and students to utilize information technology tools (Selwyn, 2011). Since social networks
have offered people a “rapidly expanding phenomenon that is changing the nature of social
relationships”, social network sites begin to provide easy and an accessible way to interact with
people to create personalized websites and share information (Muise, Christofides & Desmarais,
2009). When the studies were reviewed for the use of social media in education, faculty use it over
80%; faculty use social media 70% at least once a month; and use social media 41% in their
teaching (Seaman and Tinti-Kane 2013).

Social media is an interaction among people in order to create, to share or to exchange information
and opinions in virtual environment. Kaplan and Haenlein (2009) define social media as "a group
of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web
2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content". Generally it depends on
mobile and web-based technologies for individuals and communities to share, to cooperate, to
discuss, and to communicate. Social media types which are generally used can be stated as follows:
 Social Bookmarking: Interact by tagging and searching through websites bookmarked.
 Social News: Interacting and commenting for articles.
 Social Networking: Interacting, commenting, and joining groups.
 Social Photo and Video Sharing: Interacting, commenting by sharing photos or videos.
 Wikis: Interacting and editing by adding articles (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2009).

People use the social media platforms to share their opinions and suggestions (Fink et al.,
2011). “What other people think” is important for decision-making process and problem solutions
(Pang & Lee, 2008). Social media data can be purely text based or include audio or visual
components. Data from social media sites can be accessed directly through the platform itself or
through a range of partially to fully automated methods. The specific types of information can also
change rapidly in the social media world. Platforms sometimes release large changes in both
features and access with little to no warning (AAPOR, 2014).

Social media create opportunities for people to voice their opinions. Social media is an
effective way to make sense of mass conversation and interact with others. Many experts consider
social media as the plenty of raw data to better make sense of opinions. But it is known that the
challenge of information can give rise to a problem, but also can give an opportunity for making
sense of voices and identify problems as soon as they arise (Osimo & Mureddu, 2012).

Social media provides new opportunities for teachers and educators as well. They are using
social media as a tool to keep parents, other teachers, and students informed of the things going on
in their schools and community. Here are more benefits of social media in teaching and learning:
 Social media helps to huddle professionally,
 Social media provides people use their own " voice ",
 Social media encourages collaboration,
 Social media allows for sharing in a friendly environment,
 Social media helps to develop life-long learning policy,
 Social media offers sharing experiences, collaboration, and research,

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  Social media helps for world peace and inter-cultural understanding,
 Social media helps teachers to stay engaged in education (Kharbach,2012).

In the schools, the ICT curriculum is limited as to the technologies and software provided to
learners. Today, however, there are unlimited choices and resources available for meeting
expectations. According to the UNESCO (2008) for ICT Competency Standards of Teachers,
teachers should acquire the skills and standards to empower their students with the benefits of
technology and the personal development support.

ICT should be used effectively and efficiently in order to overcome possible obstacles in teaching-
learning processes and add value to societies’ existing structures and cultures (Nutt, 2010). On the
other hand, problems are frequently encountered, such as technical issues, a lack of equipment or
bad management in the schools. Periodically, feedback and results are collated and evaluated and
the training programs are adjusted accordingly (Zhang, 2008).While implementing the curriculum,
the key point for teachers here is to choose up-to-date topics and activities (Gülbahar, 2009).Social
media characteristics are as follow in this context:

 Social media posts tend to be short and conversational in nature,

 The amount of social media data for a popular entity can be huge,
 The content of micro-blogs has become heterogeneous (AAPOR, 2014).

The recent expansion of the web encourages users to contribute and express themselves via
blogs, videos, social networking sites, etc. All these platforms provide a huge amount of valuable
information that we are interested to analyze (Pang & Lee, 2008).The opinions, views and
experiences of teachers must be consulted in order to assess the affect of technological innovation
upon their role as facilitators of the learning process (Roblyer, 2006). Social media provide ways
to make connections with others. Main reasons are as follows but not limited with those mentioned.
 Sharing interests and goals.
 Maintaining contact.
 Finding people.
 Furthering professional development
 Debating or advocating (Vasoya et al, 2014).

Different social networking sites offer different opportunities. In the context of education, social
networking sites offer opportunity to network with other students and teachers. Social networking
sites have created a new social dimension to develop a high level of awareness. Interacting with
these sites, person can become more globally knowledgeable, tech-savvy, and even more self-
aware (Vasoya et al, 2014). To gain information what the public is thinking about is crucial for any
given topic and potential to offer good ideas. In opinion polls researchers hesitate that the public
may have given the subject little attention. But social media really fill in a gap informally. Many
social media platforms provide what people think about at any time. So a variety of researchers
measure of public attention in a broad manner. (Ripberger, 2011).
Researchers explore the potential data for predicting human behaviourfor a particular activity
informally. These methods are short term, rapid and are “predicting the present”( Choi and Varian,

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2012). As a last point exploring the public attention can clarify key information sources those
help shape public opinions.
By combining data with information for special topics a powerful picture can be bodied for
outstanding issues. People using such as Facebook and Twitter can talk about information sources
they rely on. They talk about a certain topic how influence and operates in effective ways to
dissaminite information of what is going on.

Capturing public opinions on specific topics what people think about are developed, but still
problems are exists. In particular, the groups of people are not only to be a random sample of the
population, but also people with static opinions of who enjoy expressing themselves publicly
(Mestyán et al, 2013). Potential bias in the detection of opinions in messages can be cured through
techniques known as “sentiment analysis”. A sentiment analysis involve list of words with a
sentiment “score” attached to each word is present in a given message. But still significant
challenges remains despite many academic and commercial packages for analysis which don’t
have perfect solution. Despite aforementioned limitations social media offers measuring “instant”
reactions, how the public responds to last minute news (Feldman, 2013). Furthermore in many
cases the opinion of people in social media can be relevant, easy for mining and measure
engagement for individual behavior (Department for Work and Pensions, 2014).

Social Media Messages Analysis

Social media messages analysis have been conducted for various purposes to get meaningful and
guided results. Social media platforms used with Web technologies are playing important role in
the communities. Social media run on websites, mobile apps, tools and platforms.There is a
continuous demand for these tools and thus researchers could track the "social/web ratio" to
evaluate the impact of messages and opinions on issues (Signori & Confente, 2014).

For a deeper analysis a method referred to as "sentiment analysis" which is an automatic analysis
of texts and tracking of the predictive judgments in social media realm for evaluative text (Das &
Chen, 2007). But sentiment analysis has problems with huge amounts of texts.Thus it seems that
content analysis which is more simple than sentiment analysis that is more suitable to attain desired
results (Signori, Silvia & Daniel, 2015).

Content analysis is defined as;

“Summarizing, quantitative analysis of messages that relies on the scientific method
(including attention to objectivity, intersubjectivity, a priori design, reliability, validity,
generalizability, replicability, and hypothesis testing) and is not limited as to the types of
variables that may be measured or the context in which the messages are created or
presented” (Neuendorf, 2002).

Content analysis has advantages when used as a research method:

 Provides profound insight allowing new theories on the topic to be discovered.
 It is an applicable model for unavailable quantitative research projects
 Allows for the participants’ opinion to be taken into consideration (Merriam, 2009).

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Content analysis interpretes human subjective interpretation and classify the procedure in a reliable
manner to sustain consistency over time. Thus, validity, inter-coder reliability, and intra-coder
reliability are paramunt in researches. Traditionally Krippendorff( 2004) states content analysis
with the following steps:
 Selecting a topic,
 Deciding on the sample,
 Defining concepts or units to be counted,
 Constructing categories,
 Creating coding forms,
 Training coders,
 Collecting data,
 Determining inter-coder reliability,
 Analyzing data,
 Reporting results.

Methods

The building of a methodology needs gathering, analyzing, and grouping descriptive information
available in social media for interpretation of opinions in the messages. In this study the data were
collected from the messages which were delivered by Turkish Middle School ICT teachers in the
social media. In the analysis the qualitative and quantitative analysis approaches were used. The
qualitative analysis is an approach that uses an inductive approach in social study researches and
express the views of the research subjects and definitive data collection technique in natural
environment (Bogdan & Biklen, 2006). In qualitative analysis research method, qualitative data
collection methods like observation, interview and document analysis are used to present the facts
in their natural environment as a realistic and integrated format (Yıldırım & Şimşek, 2008).

The research group was consisting of the ICT teachers working in Turkish Schools Middle Schools.
In the data collection stage, the social media tools were reviewed in order to find ICT Teachers’
messages. For this purpose inductive coding technique, frequency analysis and descriptive content
analysis methods were used. By using the inductive coding technique, the concepts from the
collected data and the relations between those concepts had been revealed.

With the frequency analysis, the quantitative appearance of the units had been used and the
intensity and importance of particular items had been identified. Also with the frequency analysis,
intensity and significance of a certain element have been determined by presenting quantitatively
the incidence frequency of units (Tavşancıl & Aslan, 2001). In this aspect, to show the intensity of
the opinions and problems that were collected for the research, the frequency (f) and percentage
(%) values were used.

For data collection 27 forum, blogs sites, Facebook and Twitter were analyzed and 220 messages
were collected those were announced by ICT Teachers in social media network environment and
it was seen that 47 messages have the same content and overlapping one another, so they were
discarded. With the content analysis, 173 messages were obtained, classified and analyzed.

5
Results

Social media messages of the ICT teachers were analyzed. The opinions of ICT teachers were
categorized under five dimensions; compulsory course, curriculum, employee rights and job
definitions, infrastructure and support and innovation. In this section, depending on these
classifications, the findings were analyzed, commented and improvements were suggested.
Classification of ICT Teachers’ Categorized Problem Areas and Suggested Improvements are
presented in Table 1.

Table1. Categorized Problem Areas of ICT Teachers’ Messages

Message Category f %

Employee rights and job definition 61 35.2

Compulsory courses 40 23.2
Curriculum deficiency 28 16.2
Innovations 23 13.3
Infrastructure and support 21 12.1

Total 173 100

When we analyzed the messages of ICT teachers, the employee rights and job definitions (f=61,
%33.2) was in the first place, the course compulsory (f=40, %23.2) was in the second place, the
curriculum deficiency (f=28 and %16.2) was in the third place, innovations (f=23, %13.3) was in
the fourth place and infrastructure and support (f=21, %12.1) was in the last place.

Opinions about employee rights and job definition and suggested improvements

ICT teachers claim that they do not have a definite job description and they are seen as a
repairman. Formatter teachership and norm position appointment is stated as a problem and
suggested solution is to stop this practice. ICT teachers state they don’t have a labor union. The
stated improvement is to have a labor union for ICT teachers. Also, working positions for ICT
teachers are reduced. They need permanent working positions at schools and radiation
compensation should be paid since they work in intensive computing environment. ICT teachers
claim about additional administrative works and the suggested improvement is not to give
administrative jobs to ICT teachers.

Opinions about compulsory courses and suggested improvements

The course selection by student became the top message of ICT teachers. As Keser (2011) stated
in the past “Computer Education” was important but nowadays this has changed as “Computer for
education” as in developed countries. Thus ICT course must be mandatory. Teachers declared that
the weekly hours of the course should be at least two hours and students should be graded for the
course. Not to grade the courses arises a dialog problem between teacher and students. The
suggested improvement is grading the course and teaching the ethic rules well. Selection of ICT
course by students is another problem and the suggested improvement is taking students’ parents’
approval for the course selection.

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Opinions about curriculum and suggested improvements

Due to fast developments in ICT, the curriculum needs improving for the internationally accepted
curriculum level. The student readiness and media literacy are not adequate, so the importance of
the course should be stated to the students and the course must be compulsory. The inadequacy of
teachers’ and filling the schools with technological gadgets is another problem. As an
improvement, training and certificates should be given to teachers parallel with international
accepted curriculum level.

Opinions about innovative ideas and suggested improvements

The most important subject that is discussed by ICT teachers about ICT is transition to the
modular teaching approach. Change and renewal are stated to be continuous. Using social media
tools in education should be encouraged. Life-long learning, contemporary infrastructure and use
of Turkish National Education Ministry’s Network are suggested for solutions.

Opinions about infrastructure and support, and suggested improvements

Technical support is the biggest problem and it is stated that ICT teachers are not skillful enough
to eliminate problems. There are no solutions to provide the technical support among the delivered
messages. The Infrastructure is old and the suggested improvement is to provide new computers
and new equipment to the classrooms. Lack of updated course material should be provided and at
least one ICT teacher should be appointed to each school. Crowded classrooms are stated and it is
expressed that new ICT classrooms should be established.

ICT Teachers’ Social Media Messages Reasons

Hur and Brush (2009) interviewed teachers who had used social media and found five reasons why
teachers participated in social media. They found the following reasons:
•To share emotional aspects of teaching.
•To communicate about situations that in local settings.
•To combat isolation.
•To explore new ideas about teaching resources and strategies.
•To experience friendship.
In our study we found out that ICT teachers have used social media for various reasons. We
categorized them and interpreted as follows.

Table 2. The ICT Teachers’ Message Reasons

Message Reasons f %

Sharing 50 29.0
Report Problems 43 24.8
Offer Solutions 32 18.4
Announcements 20 11.5
Exemplify 16 0.92

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 Starting An Action 12 0.71

Total 173 100

The ICT teachers share their success stories, new teaching technologies they have used and their
experiences (f=50, %29.0). They report problems that have not been solved yet, misuse of
administrator privileges in their schools and personal injustice and wrong practices (f=43, %24.8).
The ICT teachers offer solutions about curriculum improvement and innovations in the schools
(f=32, %18.4). The announcements are about their personal matters, ministry practices and
important examples of applications and activities (f=20, %11.5). Teachers give examples how they
have solved problems and lessons they have learned (f=16, %0.92). And teachers start activities
to organize collective resistance, and show the way for solutions (f=12, %0.71).

Conclusion
In this research, the messages of ICT teachers were collected on social media. The messages were
fundamentally analyzed in terms of reasons and content. The messages were categorized into five
categories. When the messages in social media have been investigated, ICT teachers’ messages
about education and improvements are categorized as course compulsory, curriculum, employee
rights, job description, infrastructure and innovative ideas. The improvement suggestions are
declared as follow:
 ICT course must be mandatory.
 Course hours should be 2 hours per week.
 To solve the crowded classrooms, new classrooms should be established.
 Course should be graded.
 Working conditions and roles of ICT teachers should be redesigned.
 ICT course should be renewed and updated constantly.
 International ICT course criteria should be applied.
 Modular education approach should be used.

When the reasons of messages of ICT teachers were analyzed it was seen that sharing success
stories, new teaching technologies was the most important reason of messages and than comes in
order other reasons as reporting problems, offering solutions, announcements, exemplify and
starting an action.

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