Presented at CIES Conference 2015 http://cies2015.org/

1. Analysis of Twitter Posts on
School Committee in
Indonesia
NISA FELICIA
nfelicia@albany.edu
@nisafaridz

3. The 4th most populous country
About 700 local languages
In 2012 Jakarta was the world’s most
active twitter city

4. 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).

5. 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.

6. 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)

7. 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?

8. 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)

9. Network Type
Group Count and
Group Size
Level 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)

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

12. 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

13. Aggregated NodeXL Data
Week 4 (Dec 15 – 22) was selected

14. 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
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

16. 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)

17. 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

18. … occupy bridges between other
tweeters and through which
information must pass to reach the
rest of the network
(Barash and Golder, 2010)
Information Brokers

19. detikcom
Tempodotco
okezonenews

20. 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

21. What is the dominant issue?

22. Group Tweet Linked resources Comments by
followers
1: Detikcom “It’s important
to improve the
capacity of
teachers,
principals,
superintendent
s, and
committee”
• An opinion article published
by 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!

23. What is the dominant issue?
The ineffectiveness of
School Committees
Negative images of SCs
News

24. 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.

25. 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)

26. 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)

27. How to frame the findings:
• Participatory, inclusive policy-
making process
• The craft of policy process and
analysis
• The association with democratic
participation

28. Thank you!
nfelicia@albany.edu
@nisafaridz