I recently found the blog elearnspace. George Siemens, an instructor at Red River College, writes the blog as part of his larger site dedicated to "everything elearning." He posts on learning, networks, knowledge, technology, and community.
Last week George shared an interesting but heavy report of the Australian govenment on "Self-Directed Learning in the Digital Age." As a reader of this blog, you probably qualify as one of the adult independent self-directed Internet-fueled learners that are the subject of this study.
As you click your way to learning, you may also want to check out a much smaller nugget shared by George: "E-research without discussion doesn't help." Good point. I'd like to add (as the author suggests in the actual post) that e-research with e-discussion does go a long way towards helping; and I'd dare to say that e-researching with e-soliloquizing (aka blogging) also helps, though not as much.
Monday, November 29, 2004
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Weekend Edition: Tales from Toad
I love Arlington but do wish it had a little more action. It's a dry town and on the fringes of reasonable MBTA bus service, so things are quiet -- except at night, when they become positively dead.
Still, it's an easy bus ride from my place to Harvard Square, and things start to liven up dramatically along the way. One of my favorites on that route is a little bar called "Toad," which sits inconspicuously in the shadow of Christopher's Restaurant, right across from the Porter Square T stop.
I headed to Toad with a buddy last night and had a good time there, as usual. We got there early (8pm) and it was practically empty. I brought a new card game for us to play that I found while Christmas shopping for my nephews. Each card shows a letter of the alphabet. The dealer puts down the cards one at a time until someone sees a word in the cards and yells it out. Kind of like "speed Scrabble." This was the first time I tried this game, and it was quite a hit. Not only did my buddy and I have a good time, but the ladies next to us joined in, and the bartenders took a geniune "Scrabble Player's Dictionary" out of the liquor cabinet for us to borrow. Actually, the bartenders were Scrabble ringers and they whomped us all while simultaneously serving drinks and ringing tabs.
Toad has live music every night. Last night the music started at 10:30, by which time the place was packed. There is quite a variety of music. From the casual vibe of the place you expect mostly folksy or countrified rock (not my first choices, honestly). Last night was ska and I have happily stumbled upon a couple jazz bands there too. December 3rd features one of my faves, "The Pollotronic All-Stars," a Herbie Hancock influenced jazz meets mambo band.
Still, it's an easy bus ride from my place to Harvard Square, and things start to liven up dramatically along the way. One of my favorites on that route is a little bar called "Toad," which sits inconspicuously in the shadow of Christopher's Restaurant, right across from the Porter Square T stop.
I headed to Toad with a buddy last night and had a good time there, as usual. We got there early (8pm) and it was practically empty. I brought a new card game for us to play that I found while Christmas shopping for my nephews. Each card shows a letter of the alphabet. The dealer puts down the cards one at a time until someone sees a word in the cards and yells it out. Kind of like "speed Scrabble." This was the first time I tried this game, and it was quite a hit. Not only did my buddy and I have a good time, but the ladies next to us joined in, and the bartenders took a geniune "Scrabble Player's Dictionary" out of the liquor cabinet for us to borrow. Actually, the bartenders were Scrabble ringers and they whomped us all while simultaneously serving drinks and ringing tabs.
Toad has live music every night. Last night the music started at 10:30, by which time the place was packed. There is quite a variety of music. From the casual vibe of the place you expect mostly folksy or countrified rock (not my first choices, honestly). Last night was ska and I have happily stumbled upon a couple jazz bands there too. December 3rd features one of my faves, "The Pollotronic All-Stars," a Herbie Hancock influenced jazz meets mambo band.
Friday, November 26, 2004
On-Line Resources for Face-to-Face Community Building
It's been a few months since I mentioned the Six Sigma Church initiative on these pages. Honestly, this is one of the juiciest projects I am involved in, and it's tempting to post on it more frequently. But with the privilege of insider-dom comes the responsibility of discretion, and so I must allow a thin veneer of historical perspective to come between real-life politics and my public posts.
All that to say that this exciting project of congregational empowerment got shot down over the summer, before it even had a chance to take off. After a couple weeks of teeth-gnashing, though, our Six Sigma Squadron started smiling again when we were re-authorized with an even bigger mandate than we had started with.
Now we are recovered from the summer drama and ready to fly, once again. Our mission: to lead a diverse congregation of 500 through a discussion of the role we all play in our shared ministry -- a sort of "congregational check-up." We aim ultimately to promote not just vitality and strategic thinking but also grass-roots empowerment.
We have an ambitious plan to get this community-wide discussion started over the next six months. We're starting with a written survey that will broadly assess the congregational mood. Then in March 2005 we'll use the survey results to help organize a series of neighborhood meetings, run as facilitated small-group discussions. In May 2005 we'll organize a couple big town-hall style meetings to review what came out of the neighborhood groups.
I love leading bottom-up organizational projects like this -- helping 500 people recognize their common voice. This time around, much more than ever before, I am attuned to the ways we can use the Internet to help our community thrive:
SurveyMonkey -- a convenient way to administer surveys. Compared to using only paper forms, we expect the combination of paper and on-line survey forms to significantly boost participation. By encouraging use of on-line forms whenever possible, we expect to virtually eliminate tedious data entry and focus purely on more interesting analyses. Results and analyses will also be available in real-time to everyone.
WorldCrossing -- a great platform for creating free on-line discussion forums. By hooking on-line survey repondents directly into this forum, we can stimulate an on-going community-wide discussion directly, without leaving survey participants waiting for weeks before we can make sense of survey results and organize neighborhood group discussions. (Thanks to on-line community expert Ari Davidow for recommending WebCrossing and WorldCrossing to me.)
We are also considering blogs as another on-line community tool. Bill Ives recently shared a great example of a community blog, "The uvScene." Bill also pointed me to a post by Lee LeFever about why blogs are good for running on-line communities.
All that to say that this exciting project of congregational empowerment got shot down over the summer, before it even had a chance to take off. After a couple weeks of teeth-gnashing, though, our Six Sigma Squadron started smiling again when we were re-authorized with an even bigger mandate than we had started with.
Now we are recovered from the summer drama and ready to fly, once again. Our mission: to lead a diverse congregation of 500 through a discussion of the role we all play in our shared ministry -- a sort of "congregational check-up." We aim ultimately to promote not just vitality and strategic thinking but also grass-roots empowerment.
We have an ambitious plan to get this community-wide discussion started over the next six months. We're starting with a written survey that will broadly assess the congregational mood. Then in March 2005 we'll use the survey results to help organize a series of neighborhood meetings, run as facilitated small-group discussions. In May 2005 we'll organize a couple big town-hall style meetings to review what came out of the neighborhood groups.
I love leading bottom-up organizational projects like this -- helping 500 people recognize their common voice. This time around, much more than ever before, I am attuned to the ways we can use the Internet to help our community thrive:
SurveyMonkey -- a convenient way to administer surveys. Compared to using only paper forms, we expect the combination of paper and on-line survey forms to significantly boost participation. By encouraging use of on-line forms whenever possible, we expect to virtually eliminate tedious data entry and focus purely on more interesting analyses. Results and analyses will also be available in real-time to everyone.
WorldCrossing -- a great platform for creating free on-line discussion forums. By hooking on-line survey repondents directly into this forum, we can stimulate an on-going community-wide discussion directly, without leaving survey participants waiting for weeks before we can make sense of survey results and organize neighborhood group discussions. (Thanks to on-line community expert Ari Davidow for recommending WebCrossing and WorldCrossing to me.)
We are also considering blogs as another on-line community tool. Bill Ives recently shared a great example of a community blog, "The uvScene." Bill also pointed me to a post by Lee LeFever about why blogs are good for running on-line communities.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Social Network Analysis article in "Wired"
Thanks to Don Steiny for posting this reference to Nov 2004 Wired Magazine on the SOCNET mailing list:
"Science's Next Big Score: Forget Matchmaking. Researchers should use social networks to land matching funds." By Bruce Sterling.
It's a short, fun article about significant applications of serious SNA.
"Science's Next Big Score: Forget Matchmaking. Researchers should use social networks to land matching funds." By Bruce Sterling.
It's a short, fun article about significant applications of serious SNA.
New developments in meta-organizational networks
A couple weeks ago I posted on the need for better ways to measure social capital as a function of external collaboration (or competition) between groups.
Very briefly recapping, the excellent survey paper "Network Measures of Social Capital" mentions two general approaches in this area: (1) Consider each group as if it were an individual and use regular individual-level network measures. This is clean but problematic if you care who are the boundary spanners in each group. (2) Alternatively, use two-mode networks. These will keep track of different boundary-spanners but lose track of intra-group relationships.
Last week the latest issue of Connections arrived at my door (Vol 26, Issue 1). (This is the official journal of the INSNA.) I was excited to see a featured article "A new measure of linkage between two subnetworks," by Peter Flom, Samuel Friedman, Shiela Strauss, and Alan Neaigus.
The authors begin by explaining the very dilemma I was just lamenting, only they put it much more clearly. Then they propose a relatively simple new approach to measure social capital between sub-networks that also accounts for relationships within groups. It's a great introduction to the problem of meta-organizational networks and an excellent preliminary step in solving it. It's preliminary because their approach only works for two groups. Their approach almost cries out loud for a multi-group extension, so I encourage anyone out there with an interest in this topic to go follow up on this, and please keep me posted on your progress. I would love to hear from you.
Very briefly recapping, the excellent survey paper "Network Measures of Social Capital" mentions two general approaches in this area: (1) Consider each group as if it were an individual and use regular individual-level network measures. This is clean but problematic if you care who are the boundary spanners in each group. (2) Alternatively, use two-mode networks. These will keep track of different boundary-spanners but lose track of intra-group relationships.
Last week the latest issue of Connections arrived at my door (Vol 26, Issue 1). (This is the official journal of the INSNA.) I was excited to see a featured article "A new measure of linkage between two subnetworks," by Peter Flom, Samuel Friedman, Shiela Strauss, and Alan Neaigus.
The authors begin by explaining the very dilemma I was just lamenting, only they put it much more clearly. Then they propose a relatively simple new approach to measure social capital between sub-networks that also accounts for relationships within groups. It's a great introduction to the problem of meta-organizational networks and an excellent preliminary step in solving it. It's preliminary because their approach only works for two groups. Their approach almost cries out loud for a multi-group extension, so I encourage anyone out there with an interest in this topic to go follow up on this, and please keep me posted on your progress. I would love to hear from you.
Friday, November 19, 2004
WSJ on information diffusion
Speaking of People magazine and information diffusion (see yesterday's post), today's WSJ has a front page story about Jaye Hersh, owner of Intuition, a trendy clothing store in LA. Her little store does $5M in annual sales, largely thanks to a beautiful symbiotic relationship she has with Hollywood celebrities and the fashion press.
The article opens with a perfect example of Ms. Hersh's business model. After spotting a teenager wearing white leather moccasins, Ms. Hersh tracked down a distributor and ordered 300 pairs. Then she sent a complimentary pair to Drew Barrymore. But the the key breakthrough came when sources revealed that Kate Hudson had also bought a pair from Ms. Hersh, through a friend. Armed with that information, Ms. Hersh called the style director of People magazine. Next thing you know, Ms. Barrymore and Ms. Hudson were smiling in the pages of People, showing off their footsies, and Ms. Hersh had 1,200 orders for moccasins.
If you order now, your teenage daughter might get her moccasins in time for Christmas, but I don't recommend that. Connectedness is rather far behind the fashion times -- I am still debating whether to buy myself a fitted striped button-down shirt -- so we pass this story along more as an example of effective networking than as a fashion tip.
The article opens with a perfect example of Ms. Hersh's business model. After spotting a teenager wearing white leather moccasins, Ms. Hersh tracked down a distributor and ordered 300 pairs. Then she sent a complimentary pair to Drew Barrymore. But the the key breakthrough came when sources revealed that Kate Hudson had also bought a pair from Ms. Hersh, through a friend. Armed with that information, Ms. Hersh called the style director of People magazine. Next thing you know, Ms. Barrymore and Ms. Hudson were smiling in the pages of People, showing off their footsies, and Ms. Hersh had 1,200 orders for moccasins.
If you order now, your teenage daughter might get her moccasins in time for Christmas, but I don't recommend that. Connectedness is rather far behind the fashion times -- I am still debating whether to buy myself a fitted striped button-down shirt -- so we pass this story along more as an example of effective networking than as a fashion tip.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Which blogs matter? and more on blog linkages
Thanks to Bill Ives for tipping me off to this paper, "Information Diffusion Through Blogspace," which he describes "a scientific discussion of how new concepts spread out through blogs, and how to find blogs that matter."
I took a look at the paper, very curious about the idea of measuring how much one blog matters vs another. Put this way, the question reminds me of a bit from a Laurie Anderson song, "Que es mas macho: lightbulb o schoolbus?" Or in our current context, "Which blog matters more: lightbulb or schoolbus?"
And now for the answers: Laurie Anderson would have us believe that schoolbus is more macho than lightbulb. With similar authority, I submit that lightbulb matters more than schoolbus.
You surely sense the shaky ground of opinion underfoot. So how do authors David Gruhl, R. Guha, Liben-Nowell, and Andrew Tomkins bring an objective point of view to this debate? By devising an algorithm to identify particular individuals who are highly effective at contributing to the spread of "infectious" topics. Sounds like a good metric to me, up to a point. I need to read more to see what the authors have to say about competing factors like numbers (think People magazine) vs authority (think Harvard Business Review).
For myself, I am thinking The New Yorker, as usual. In this week's issue, my fave Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point fame) writes about intellectual property and asks, what's so bad about plagiarism, anyway? He writes personally, based on a Tony-nominated play "Frozen" that cribbed 675 words verbatim from a piece he wrote. It's a great article and after you read it you will never think about plagiarism the same way again. It's also a good compliment to any discussion about information diffusion (which Gladwell points out is not so distinct from plagiarism).
Speaking of information diffusion, for those of you who appreciated my review of TouchGraph, which gives a visualization of blog relatedness, I recommend you check out Bill Ives' recent review of BlogStreet Browser, which does almost the identical thing. Try them both and you will see the difference.
I took a look at the paper, very curious about the idea of measuring how much one blog matters vs another. Put this way, the question reminds me of a bit from a Laurie Anderson song, "Que es mas macho: lightbulb o schoolbus?" Or in our current context, "Which blog matters more: lightbulb or schoolbus?"
And now for the answers: Laurie Anderson would have us believe that schoolbus is more macho than lightbulb. With similar authority, I submit that lightbulb matters more than schoolbus.
You surely sense the shaky ground of opinion underfoot. So how do authors David Gruhl, R. Guha, Liben-Nowell, and Andrew Tomkins bring an objective point of view to this debate? By devising an algorithm to identify particular individuals who are highly effective at contributing to the spread of "infectious" topics. Sounds like a good metric to me, up to a point. I need to read more to see what the authors have to say about competing factors like numbers (think People magazine) vs authority (think Harvard Business Review).
For myself, I am thinking The New Yorker, as usual. In this week's issue, my fave Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point fame) writes about intellectual property and asks, what's so bad about plagiarism, anyway? He writes personally, based on a Tony-nominated play "Frozen" that cribbed 675 words verbatim from a piece he wrote. It's a great article and after you read it you will never think about plagiarism the same way again. It's also a good compliment to any discussion about information diffusion (which Gladwell points out is not so distinct from plagiarism).
Speaking of information diffusion, for those of you who appreciated my review of TouchGraph, which gives a visualization of blog relatedness, I recommend you check out Bill Ives' recent review of BlogStreet Browser, which does almost the identical thing. Try them both and you will see the difference.
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