Towards Identifying Teacher TopicInterests and Expertise within an Online Social Networking Site

Online social networking tools developed for educators promise better mentorship, professional development and resource sharing among teachers. This paper presents a model of teacher mentoring behaviors within an existing middle school teacher social networking site. We analyze how teachers help others in discussion forums and learn a model that describes their behavior. Our initial results indicate that this mentoring model is relatively consistent with profile answers, suggesting that we can build predictive models of teacher types based on their observed behaviors. We expect that our analysis can be useful in characterizing roles of many teachers who do not provide their profile information.