Fonctionnements et trajectoires des réseaux professionnels en ligne : le cas des réseaux d’enseignants

Digital technologies facilitate the creation of networks focused on connecting people. They allow users to create, mix and easily share informative contents and therefore support the development of on-line networks with the objective of sharing knowledge between professionals. We make the hypothesis that these online networks could support the self-training of professionals. We decided to target our research on the analysis of networks created by one professional category: the French teachers. We studied several networks of various sizes created by teachers in different school subjects. Questions occurred to us on the process implemented in these networks to collectively produce resources and on the consequences for their participating members. This article is a report on our methodology and also describes two very different types of functioning, the “hives” and the “sandboxes” towards which teachers’ online networks seem to be attracted according to their changes of trajectories