How Would You Promote Education through Social Networks?

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I was recently asked to put together some thoughts about the potential impact Social Networks could have on education by a really savvy M.D. over at Cerner, and I thought this audience might be interested too.  I have not seen too much about this topic, and would really like to hear your thoughts.

Peer Learning & Diabetes
Peer Learning & Diabetes

Social Networking sites simplify conversations by lowering the cost to communicate to large groups, both for the speaker and the recipient.  Accomplished by enforcing small messages, recipients can easily consume or ignore the content with trivial effort.  This in itself has some pretty interesting impact on one’s social network.  But, the messages are also semi-permanent,  consumed at leisure, and are often open to any interested peers, not just the intended recipient.

Open recorded dialog offers a unique value in communication:  the conversation doesn’t end just because it has stopped.  This persistence and openness in the dialog has some interesting conceivable implications for education:

  1. Participants can join into the conversation, well after it’s stopped. This is a biggie.  This open availability allows individuals to pick up the conversation where it left off, taking it in new directions their own context brings with them.  It is this factor that not only contributes to many new ideas, but also helps drive quality by squeezing the most out of existing ones..
  2. Discuss once, available to all.  The SN creates a naturally accumulating body of knowledge, available to all with thanks to your favorite search engine.
  3. Record the process, not just the answer. Following along with a conversation, you can actually learn with the participants, not just gain from their answers.  Further, many times the conversation is not going to answer your specific question, but you can gain insight from the ideas already discussed, and get pointers to more places to look.
  4. Don’t have to know conversation partners in advance.  In conjunction with (1), you can put a question out to your peers, and see who responds.  Find experts, even when you don’t know where to look.

Much of the above is available to any generic SN, from MySpace to any online forum.  But, what SNs offer over and above online forums, is trust.  The who you are carrying on conversations with, you know.  You know whether the respondent is knowledgeable or guessing, and can more likely read into the subtlety of their responses. Couple this trust with focused goals, as SERMO has for the medical community, and you open the pool even wider for advice.

You’ve noticed that the language I am using is around conversation, dialog, and advice.  Because of the short-form messaging, SNs are much more suited to peer-based education than seminars.  I have yet to see anyone artfully present more than maybe 1,000 words on the Internet; it’s no substitute for medical journals.  It is, however, an excellent place to discuss the journal contents, grind out all the last subtleties, and come up with ideas for your next article.

It is the pressure of our peers, after all, that gives us the support to try things we otherwise wouldn’t have.  — BILL TREASURER, Right Risk

In addition to these benefits, there are the possible benefits of all of this being a social venture: cultural norms.  If you, the educator, control a network, there’s a lot you can do to build group behaviors to reinforce whatever you are trying to teach them: group rewards if 90% of the class does their homework, peer pressure to go outside and exercise for asthmatics, peer support in the middle of the night not to give in to that nicotine craving, or even just introducing icebreakers prior to a convention.

Each of these has been around long well before the prevalence of SNs.  But today, SNs now provide an easy platform that automates much of the hard work, and create a reason for pools of trusted colleagues to come together spanning many timezones.  From your colleagues, and from their colleagues, ideas and new perspectives arise.  It requires motivation on your part, but this is prime time for peer education.

So, how have you used SNs for education?  Constructively used peer pressure in an educational setting?  What’s your example of peer pressure helping you?

[Photo credit: Chris Corrigan]

Implied Social Networks: People In the News with Rankings

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As a follow up to this previous post with an image of the relationship between people mentioned in the news, I’ve been asked to provide more detail.

First, why bother at all?  Exploring the implied relationships may tell us about the individuals in question, but certainly provide more context to each of the other topics at hand.  This context not only provides additional understanding the of topic, but can also be a valuable research tool in quickly determining which other topics may impact the one at hand.

What are the relationships shown?  Shown are names occurring in the same news articles, which implies a relationship.  This relationship may a formal relationship, e.g. the working relationship of Bush (8) and Condoleezza Rice (10). Or, the individuals may be related to a common topic such as Michael Phelps (4) and Babe Ruth.

Following are the top 20 names, by centrality, and the number of different implied relationships for each.

People in the News (detail)
People in the News (detail)
  1. Barack Obama   1128
  2. John McCain 902
  3. Sarah Palin 405
  4. Michael Phelps 237
  5. Pervez Musharraf  95
  6. Kwame Kilpatrick  103
  7. Hillary Clinton   270
  8. Bush  158
  9. Joe Biden   218
  10. Condoleezza Rice  107
  11. Steve Jobs  160
  12. John Edwards   101
  13. Clark Rockefeller 69
  14. Britney Spears 122
  15. Brett Favre 65
  16. Bernie Mac  60
  17. Miley Cyrus 70
  18. Bill Clinton   148
  19. Anwar Ibrahim  34
  20. Stephenie Meyer   27

What’s the data set?  A random sampling of news sites including NYTimes, Google, Yahoo!, CNN, Drudge, and the like.

Is this an accurate reflection of news?  I am polling a number of the big news sites, so hopefully it’s not far off.

Any surprises? Miley Cyrus!

Deconstructing Delicious: Merlin Mann

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Merlin Mann has a large set of public delicious tags, and I thought I’d take a stab at their interrelation.  By my measure of centrality, his top 20 are:

Merlin Mann's Delicious Tags
Merlin Mann's Delicious Tags
  1. 43folders
  2. domains
  3. tumble
  4. music
  5. sanfrancisco
  6. macosx
  7. flickr
  8. mbwideas
  9. gtd
  10. movies
  11. design
  12. tv
  13. selflink
  14. mac
  15. heh
  16. email
  17. productivity
  18. lifehacks
  19. the_man
  20. cigars

Why Merlin Mann you might ask?  Well, I like his work, and he has a walloping collection of tags.

Want your tags drawn and quartiled?  Leave a comment or drop me a line at erich@howweknowus.com…

Innovation Thrives Under Constraint

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This is not my usual topic, but I’ve done a lot of work looking at innovation, and the conditions under which it thrives.

Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, founders of Twitter, have talked often of the “constraints” that are built into the Twitter app. You can only post 140 characters in a single message, for example. And because Twitter didn’t have desktop client when it launched, a number of them were created and they are probably better than anything Twitter would have created. Same with the iPhone apps like Twinkle and Twitterific. A VC, Aug 2008

My interest started with looking at innovation levels and the social networks of the individuals involved; and Fred Wilson hit on something really important here: innovation thrives under constraint.

Ask any artist, there’s nothing more more terrifying than a naked canvas, blank sheet of paper, or unformed block of clay.  It is the constraints that give us to innovate something from.  They are the core of the idea that pushes us through writers/painters/coders block.

Robert Pirsig tells us about an experiment in writing.  Students were consistently having difficulty when asked to write about anything they wanted.  So he had them all write for an hour solely about the back of their thumb.  Lots of odd looks surely, but no one had any trouble finding something to say.

Constraints provide focus.  Focus allows execution.  If the goal is creating an external service (e.g. web service), focus also communicates what the service will and will not do — providing clear constraints to the next ring of innovators.

8 Requirements for a Perfect Contact Management System

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I read about some new organization software over at LifeHacker, which got me thinking about what would be my ideal organization software.  I am beginning to embrace the implications of the uneven levels of attention I can pay to people I know, and the definite limit to which I can keep everyone in my head.  With this in mind, I have come up with 8 requirements which would greatly enhance my ability to maintain a wider and more useful network of contacts.  What software do you use, and what would you add to the list?

  1. Integration of Email, Contacts, Tasks, and Calendar. Supporting your network requires all of those, so a tool to help you manage it should too.  (I refer bellow to an entry in any one of these as an event.)  My favorite piece of integration is the automatic add of new contacts to my contact lists.
  2. Reminders for events relevant to your contacts. Any good calendar should do this.  Unfortunately, most require the calendar to be open to perform this.  Hosted calendars like Google’s and Yahoo’s, allow you to be reminded by email.  A handy function for those of us on the run.
  3. Reminders to reach out to your contacts. You can do this manually now through tasks or using your calendar, but this is ripe for automation.
  4. Provide context about each contact. This should be presented when you are reading or creating a task/email/meeting in your system.  How you know the person, and the last time you saw them, etc., are usually available through searching your contacts and calendar if you keep track of these, but again, ripe for automation.
  5. Provide context about each conversation. Latest emails, events, etc. each time you are creating a task/email/meeting in your system.
  6. Show tasks outstanding and recently completed for the individuals in each action.  A summary of the tasks you owe someone can help define a productive conversation.
  7. Show tasks outstanding and recently completed by the individuals in each action.  A summary of what you are owed, similarly can help define a productive conversation.
  8. Automatic tagging of actions and participants. With all of the natural language processing developments over the recent years, it would be relatively simple to pull themes from the content of each event and record those along with the participants.  When you create new events, the tag database could be polled as you are creating a new event to recommend people who may be interested, and other relevant topics.  Would be a helpful plugin for your word processor too.

Most of these are available today, but not in an automated fashion and often not available at the same time.  I primarily use GMail with a Firefox plugin called GTDInbox which together provide good integration of email, contacts, tasks, and calendar.

Google Calendar provides good reminders of events relevant to my contacts, but requires me to set them up.

The more recent version of GTDInbox provides an increasing level of context about the participants, and I hope they keep pushing in that direction.  The unfortunate thing today is that it does this by learning association of special labels it uses.  This is indeed helpful for labeling, but the more I communicate with someone, the less I need the context.  Since it’s a Firefox plugin, they could create a side panel, which would also allow showing the tasks owed and outstanding.

As for autotagging?  Please, this is a desperate cry for help…. If there are any creative programmers out there, take a look at OpenCalais, and make a pluggin for FireFox + GMail!

Predict Attention in Social Networks

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People distribute attention according to a power-law distribution.

Power-laws have long been associated with distribution of quantity of links individuals in social networks have. My on-going research suggests that power-laws not only describe distributions at the network level, they also describe distribution at the individual level. We communicate in a power-law distribution with our contacts, by frequency. Initial analysis also suggests we spend time communicating with each other according to a power-law.

The distribution analysis for frequency was conducted across six social networks of various types ranging in size from fewer than 100, to more than 6,000 individuals. Most SN research has been conducted on smaller networks (fewer than 100 individuals); so testing across a wide range of sizes both confirms earlier results and suggests that size is not a factor in the power-law distribution. I was concerned about possible distortion on small networks due to implications from Dunbar’s Number. It turns out that small networks are indeed different, which I am not going to go into here, but they still fit these distributions.

Analysis on any complete sub-set, will still fit these pattern. By complete, I mean that connections between any two individuals in the sub-set, must be the same as in the whole set. The value is the introduction of the ability to sample, and to operate over a network recursively. Similarly, much information can be gained about a larger network, even if the data you have is incomplete.

This distribution may allow us to accurately predict impact of changes to any social network. By measuring the current state, we can estimate the impact of adding/removing people and connections. This could be of tremendous value pursuing in any social goal creating by facilitating cohesion, culture, and the like.

I intend on publishing the results and methodology. If you are looking for that level of detail you’ll have to wait, but mail me (erich at howweknowus.com) if you would like to discuss.

Newspapers: Don’t Give Up Yet!

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Dan Gilmore:

Newspapers have at least two more huge opportunities.

First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities’ histories and all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from using it — as they would all the time — as part of their current lives. The revenues would go up with targeted search and keyword-specific ads on those pages, I’m absolutely convinced. But an equally important result would be to strengthen local ties.

Second, expand the conversation with the community in the one place where it’s already taking place: the editorial pages. Invert them. Make the printed pages the best-of and guide to a conversation the community can and should be having with itself. The paper can’t set the agenda, at least not by itself (nor should it), but it can highlight what people care about and help the community have a conversation that is civil and useful.

What Gilmore is suggesting is to stop one step earlier in the editorial process.  Great editors are excellent at searching and coalescing the voice of the people.  Stop at the search, and promote the voices themselves; you have a local competitive advantage that is hard to top.

[via Doc Searls; Photo: Matt Callow]

Response: Is social media becoming a vast wasteland?

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Shel Israel penned a great article with an unfortunate quote from writer and blogger Ashok Banker about his retreat from social media,

There shouldn’t be writers and fans. We’re all writers on such platforms and should be all equal. The moment there are writers and ‘names,’ it’s a failure of the system. I’m sorry but after seeing the way most bloggers shamelessly abuse the medium to promote themselves and their work instead of genuinely writing something worthwhile, I realized that blogging and microblogging have also become tools to crass commercialism.

Blogging, like any other technology, is a just a tool.  This one in particular has done wonders in lowering the barrier so that anyone with Internet access has a persistent soapbox.  And yes, that anyone also includes crass commercialists.

I for one, hope Mr. Banker will continue to blog and engage through social media.  He has already gone well beyond how most authors engage with their audience today, and it would be a shame to fall to a false defeat.