Analysis of Twitter Posts on School Committee in

Indonesia

NISA FELICIAnfelicia@albany.edu

@nisafaridz

The 4th most populous country

About 700 local languages

In 2012 Jakarta was the world’s most active twitter city

Year 2002 : Decentralization of education

system

• 1945 - 1999: Highly centralized

system

• Decentralization: to promote greater

local participation in decision-

making

School Committee (SC) was established in every school. • The members including teachers, administrators, parents and

communities • Authority over financial and educational programs management

(Ministry of Education and Culture, 2002).

A number of studies (Parker & Raihani, 2011; Pradhan et

al., 2014; Vernez et al. 2012) found that many SCs did not

function as they were stipulated.

• Parents and communities did not actively participate in

school policy processes

• Parents have limited understanding of their roles and

the functions of SC

• Parents are not motivated to participate

One possible reason for this disconnect between policy intentions and practice may be a public perception of the proper function of SC.

Twitter is a popular and influential social media in Indonesia (Lukman, 2014) as it is in many nations (Cross, 2011)

Twitter users have a chance to use pseudonym that diminishes the risk from expressing controversial or nonmainstream views (Himelboim et al., 2013).

The Ministry intention to increase parental involvement in education

(MoEC 2015)

SC-like reforms is among the common reform agenda in many

developing countries (e.g., Abadzi, 2013; Altschuler, 2013; Khan, 2007)

How are the messages about SC shared among Indonesian Twitters?

a) What is the type of network structure built through the act of tweeting and retweeting?

b) Do tweeters develop conversation on SC?

c) Is there any salient “information broker” who diffuses information to different clusters? who are they?

What is the dominant issue shared on Twitter?

Integration of social network

analysis and content analysis

(Himelboim et al., 2013)

NodeXL software to import, analyze,

and visualize Twitter data (Smith et

al., 2014; 2009)

Network TypeGroup Count and

Group SizeLevel of group

interconnectivity

Isolates –unconnected participants

Examples

Polarized Crowds 2 large Disconnected Few Political controversy, divisive topics

Tight Crowds 2-6 medium Connected Few Hobbies, professional topics

Brand clusters Many small Few connections Many Brands, public events, popular subjects

Community clusters

Many small and medium

Moderate connections

Few Global media topics

Broadcast network 1 large, some secondary

Inbound connections

Moderate News and media outlets, famous individuals

Support network 1 large, some secondary

Outbound connections

Moderate Companies and services with customer support

Six Types of Network Structure(Smith et al., 2014)

Six Types of Network Structure(Smith et al., 2014)

1. Import data

Week 1: Dec 1

Week 2: Dec 8

Week 3: Dec 15

Week 4: Dec 22

Week 5: Dec 29

2. Aggregated NodeXL data

Aggregated NodeXL Data

Week 4 (Dec 15 – 22) was selected

Graph Metric Value

Graph Type Directed

Vertices 640

Unique Edges 1452

Edges With Duplicates 279

Total Edges 1731

Self-Loops 578

Reciprocated Vertex Pair Ratio 0.235157159

Reciprocated Edge Ratio 0.380772856

Connected Components 311

Single-Vertex Connected Components 286

Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component 302

Maximum Edges in a Connected Component 1324

Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) 11

Average Geodesic Distance 3.474467

Graph Density 0.002594386

Modularity 0.529546

NodeXL Version 1.0.1.334

Readability Metric Value

Low density: most of the tweeters are not connected to one another.

640 tweeters post (and repost) tweets about School Committee

There are 1731 tweets

Isolates: not connected to any other tweeter who tweets about SC

Individual tweets. The tweets are not “replies to”, “retweet”, or “mentions” others

Fairly low: there are few conversations occur between the tweeters

The Type of Network

Some small and medium clusters

High in-bound (G1, G3, G4)

In one cluster, there are fairly numbers of interactions (G2)

Relatively many isolates

People repeat what prominent news and media organizations tweet (Smith et al., 2014)

Many of the tweeters are relatively unconnected to others in the large groups (who discuss the same topics)

Many people do not develop two-way (reciprocal) conversation; they tend to broadcast information or news

… occupy bridges between other tweeters and through which information must pass to reach the rest of the network

(Barash and Golder, 2010)

Information Brokers

detikcom

Tempodotco

okezonenews

detikcom

tempodotco

okezonenews

They are the most important Twitter

accounts in this context:

• Many users follow them

• Their followers have many other

followers

• Many users retweeted them

• In-degree centrality

• Betweenness centrality

• Eigenvector centrality

What is the dominant issue?

Group Tweet Linked resources Comments by followers

1: Detikcom “It’s important to improve the capacity of teachers, principals, superintendents, and committee”

• An opinion article publishedby Detik.com written by an education scholar

• He argues that schools have lack of capacity to implement the new curriculum, and the current professional development system does not support the capacity building.

None

2: Tempodotco “School Committees fail to monitor school budget”

• Many SCs are dominated by the school staffs and their colleagues so that SCs do not function as they are stipulated.

• Low accountability and transparency

• “which means many schools are corrupt”

• “many of SC members are principals’ cronies”

2: Okezonenews “School Committee loads parents with burdens”

• A legislative member argues that SCs in many schools charge parents with “donation” – this is unconstitutional

• Poor parents!

What is the dominant issue?

The ineffectiveness of School Committees

Negative images of SCs

News

The “important tweeters” are Mass Media• In the USA: individual and

educational organizations• In the political context in

Indonesia: individuals (leaders), news, and organizations

In the context of educational policy discourse*, Twitter is mostly used for broadcasting news instead of discussing them.

People are RT-ing for different possible reasons (Boyd et al., 2010)• The data is not sufficient to make the conclusion

about RTs

Implication for policy dissemination and policy makers• To use Twitter data for policy evaluation• To use Twitter as a way to disseminate

policy(Smith et al., 2014)

Future Research

Time series

• To understand the pattern

• To be more sensitive of “off-line”

world

School Committee + other policies

Tweets + Twit-survey

• Why retweet? (Boyd et al., 2010)

Individual tweeters only

• Yavuz (2014)

How to frame the findings:

• Participatory, inclusive policy-

making process

• The craft of policy process and

analysis

• The association with democratic

participation

Thank you!

nfelicia@albany.edu@nisafaridz