Social Network Analysis to Blog-based Online Community

We use blogs as tools of social learning. By browsing the selected peer works and the comments made by peers as well as instructors on students' blogs, students are empowered to stimulate new ideas different from each other. Survey results show that students who took the lab courses are satisfied with turning in lab results through blog posting, getting instructor's in-class interactions, piracy reduction, and social learning. Social network analysis further indicates the degree of the social connectedness in the learning group is high. With probability 65.8%, namely nearly 2 out 3, the 36 participants by making only 3.5 comments per person in average, can chase the dialogue links and read their peers' works along in just a few chained links (all below 7, and 2.8 on average in our case). We also found there existed a few opinion leaders, 4 out of 36, in the group. Those opinion leaders created opportunities for their peers to expose themselves to high quality works which served as live model examples.