  Online Social Networking may be a way to support health professionals' need
for continuous learning through interaction with peers and experts.
Understanding and evaluating such learning is important but difficult, and
Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a solution. This paper demonstrates how
SNA can be used to study levels of participation as well as the patterns of
interactions that take place among health professionals in a large online
professional learning network. Our analysis has shown that their learning
network is highly centralised and loosely connected. The level of participation
is low in general, and most interactions are structured around a small set of
users consisting of moderators and core members. The structural patterns of
interaction indicates there is a chance of small group learning occurring and
requires further investigation to identify those potential learning groups.
This first stage of analysis, to be followed by longitudinal study of the
dynamics of interaction and complemented by content analysis of their
discussion, may contribute to greater sophistication in the analysis and
utilisation of new environments for health professional learning.
