del.icio.us tagometer and board interlocks

It's spring break at BU. While my students are away, I am doing a bit of housekeeping and finishing my online introduction to network mathematics.

For housekeeping, I have upgraded Connectedness to the new Blogger platform, and I just added a new feature to the sidebar--the del.icio.us Tag-o-Meter. There you can see the tags used most often to describe this blog, according to users of del.icio.us (one of the most popular social bookmarking services). By clicking on any one of the tags, it's easy to explore the most popular tangents to our own eclectic posts. For example: socialnetworks, collaboration, business, and community. The Tag-o-Meter is a great example of dynamically generated content; it summarizes Connectedness reader feedback with no mediation on my part. Something like the Referrer Feed (farther down in the sidebar).

Mathematically speaking, del.icio.us tags are just like corporate boardrooms. Both are examples of bipartite networks, which link two distinct types of nodes (red and blue in the example at right) that otherwise do not connect to each other. For example, tags relate to other tags only indirectly through their shared links to website URLs. Similarly, boards link to their members and through those links develop interlocks with other boards. See They Run Richmond and TheyRule.net for great stories emerging from bipartite networks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

BU students search for value with social networks

It's four weeks into my second semester teaching at Boston University, and I do feel like I've learned a few things. Compared to my first go-round, this time more than ever I am keeping Don Ronchi's words close to heart: "People create and navigate social networks best when the process is driven by the search for value" (which I first posted here).

Students come to my class largely ignorant of and uninterested in the science of networks. Last term I tried to teach them about networks with mixed results.

What my students do come hungry for is learning how to build their own websites. While it might be seen as a liability that I prefer not to teach website-building, I choose to use that as a pillar of instructional design: Instead of "teaching" that part of the class, instead I help my students learn that material from each other. Together we end up with a lot of cool website projects and very active social networking--which provides ideal case study material for the topic I most want to teach.

Every step of the way, I am thrilled with Moodle, the open-source course management system that is also one of the best collaborative platforms I've ever used. Please be my guest and visit our classroom.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

Shared information visualization by IBM's Many Eyes

My friend David Lane just told me about Many Eyes, a new experimental online platform for information visualization. See this review by O'Reilly Radar.
You may also be interested in my previous posts on network visualization. Many Eyes offers not only a comprehensive suite of visualization techniques but also promises to "harness the collective intelligence of the net for insight and analysis."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

Collective Leadership

Having just completed a social network analysis project with a new client, I asked him if anything had played out differently than he expected. He replied that he expected to see key leaders in his organization (and got that) but what he didn't expect was the impact of seeing how all the pieces fit together. Seeing that context helped him appreicate how individual his notion of leadership had been.

I was excited to hear his revelation and told him about the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), which is convening its annual "Creating Space" gathering for the theme of "Collective Leadership." Book your ticket to Baltimore: April 11-13, 2007.

Kudos also to my friend and colleague Claire Reinelt of LLC, for her recently published "Handbook of Leadership Development Evaluation," co-edited with Kelly Hannum and Jennifer Martineau of the Center for Creative Leadership.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

Friendly intro to network math from Google Page Creator

Yesterday was the first lecture of my web science class at BU. I am already learning a lot from my teaching fellow, Sowmya Manjanatha, who is much more expert in web programming than I am. She just introduced me to Google Lab's Page Creator -- a great (if quirky) web service that allows newbies to dive in and make slick-looking web pages in seconds.

Within a minute of signing up for Page Creator, I did a copy and paste from Word and --voila-- here is my online syllabus. I also reposted my Introduction to Network Mathematics, which came out equally great except for the malfunctioning table of contents links. The real version of my Intro to Net Math resides on the class website, which requires registation but does allow "guest" access with a simple click.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

Web Science Research Initiative

Having recovered from my first semester teaching Web Science at Boston University, I am eagerly planning an even better go-round this spring. Here are three (as always) important new ingredients to the course:

1. Introduction to network mathematics. Definitions of everything you need to know to get your hands dirty with network algorithms--still in rough draft form--compiled and edited from excellent reference material in Wikipedia and PlanetMath.
2. Moodle. This course management system is a professor's best friend. Thanks Prof. Brian Linard for telling me about it. Also thanks to Prof. Jerry Kane for telling me how he used a wiki to promote his students from passive learners into active course designers and graders--something I intend to do as well on my Moodle site.
3. Web Science Research Initiative. Announced in the Nov 2, 2006 NY Times as a joint initiative of MIT and the University of Southampton, WSRI includes this compelling vision of "web science." My favorite section is "Web Sociology" which surveys state-of-the-art research in Communities of interest, Information structures and social structures, Significance and its metrics, Trust and reputation, and Web morality. The bibliography is priceless.
   

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

When losing is learning

Odin Zackman passes along the fact of the day from CharityFocus.org:

"A new study suggests that losing an employee, at least in a high-tech field, is not necessarily as bad as it seems. 'Firms can wind up learning when employees leave their firm, which is contrary to the conventional wisdom -- that firms learn by hiring away employees,' says Wharton management professor Lori Rosenkopf. Why? Because, according to Rosenkopf, there are social networks that transcend companies and allow the employees left behind to gain access to the knowledge being generated at their colleague's new place of business."

You can read more here.

It's funny to me how the above study seems to ignore the most fundamental way that losing relates to learning. By invoking "access to knowledge being generated at the colleague's new place of business," the study neatly sidesteps true loss and instead suggests "let's keep in touch." But so many of our most important life lessons come after real loss--it's the most powerful means of learning, in my book. Learning by losing has also been verified through SNA-driven computer simulations, most famously by James G. March's "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning," published in 1991 and very neatly summarized in nine slides by Steve Borgatti.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.