Title: Measuring a university-community collaboration using social network analysis

Authors: Geoff Woolcott; Dan Chamberlain

Addresses: School of Education, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480, Australia ' The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Melbourne VIC 3068, Australia

Abstract: One of the roles of a modern university is to engage with the education community as a co-creator of society's collective knowledge. Co-creation, however, is known to be a complex task that relies on collaboration across a network of participants. This paper shows how social network analysis was used to chart, retrospectively, the development of a knowledge co-creation network established through collaboration between educators, scientists and secondary school teachers. The analysis suggests that such measurements may be useful in establishment and sustainability of a well-connected collaborative project network. In the case of this particular project, the analysis suggests ways in which the project could have been optimised through consideration of progression and effectiveness measures. A surprising result was that pre-service teacher in initial teacher education programs may serve as an effective way to sustain project outcomes. Potential application of this type of analysis is discussed as a way of ensuring effective progress in university-community engagement projects.

Keywords: university; community; complexity; network analysis; education; STEM; science; technology; engineering and mathematics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLC.2019.097168

International Journal of Learning and Change, 2019 Vol.11 No.1, pp.18 - 38

Received: 16 Jun 2017
Accepted: 03 May 2018
Published online: 02 Jan 2019 *

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