Abstract:

During the month of August 2020, the Iztasocial Disciplinary Social Network was created from the social network Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/) as a means of communication between teachers and students belonging to the FES Iztacala of the UNAM, Mexico. In the beginning, three professors participated and invited their students. The growth of Iztasocial was gradual, and after three semesters, important data were available for analysis.

This was a descriptive study that analyzed the content of the publications made by Iztasocial participants.
The sample was conformed of all Iztasocial users in the three semesters, being configured as follows:
There were 14982 messages from 887 participants in three semesters: August-December 2020, January-July 2021 and August-December 2021.

Procedure:
There was access to the Iztasocial database then the data were analyzed using Wordstat V.9 (https://provalisresearch.com).

Results:
Through the analysis, it could be observed that during the first semester, the most frequent words with the frequencies shown in parentheses were the name of teacher 2 (373), the name of teacher 1 (325), and the tag #edumedia (188), which was part of a curricular activity. During the second semester, they were first the name of teacher 1 (949), the word Social (913), and the word Hello (825). During the third semester, they were the name of teacher 1 (685), the word Hello (541), and the name of teacher 2 (426).

The most frequent phrases in the first semester were: Educational psychologist (71), Thank you very much (40), and Good night (33).
During the second semester, they were Social Iespoh (594), Thank you very much (149), and Good night (121).
During the third semester, Good night (121), Thank you very much (87), and Social Iespoh (72).

Through an analysis using dendrograms, different clusters were obtained that reflected the content of the publications. Shown in parentheses are the phrases that were grouped in the two most frequent clusters: (Good work, Excellent work, Social Iespoh, Call attention) and (Meaningful learning, Good night, Hello classmates, I share with you, Learning strategies, Study habits, Educational area, Highly important).

Conclusions:
Educational institutions have been looking for favorable interaction spaces for teachers and students in which they can share, communicate and disseminate information on topics of interest. This has been achieved with Iztasocial, which, for three semesters, has collected relevant information on the interaction between participants.
It is pertinent to mention that Iztasocial is a social network that protects its users and has specific terms of use to promote safe interaction between students and teachers.
As can be seen, the WordStat program was able to give meaning to the topics discussed within the social network, starting from the simplest, frequent words to something more complex such as frequent phrases, and then to a higher level of complexity, which presents its own meaning, such as clusters of phrases, which already speak of the topics discussed by users. This allows a novel methodological approach, which saves time to avoid reading thousands of publications posted in Iztasocial to obtain their meaning, which could take weeks of work.

Keywords:

Social networks, mastodon, psychology, social media, education.