Willrich's Favorite Links on networks from Diigo

The Thinking Stick » Blog Archive » Stages of PLN adoption

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:30:10 -0000

Posted by: willrich

John Connell » Blog Archive » Learning 2.0: The Power of Learning in a Networked World - part 1

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:54:47 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

“It is this shift away from the notion that we need a top-down hierarchy of some kind to organise and operate education on our behalf that is crumbling under the impact of networks. The merely-smart education leaders are those who are trying to find a compromise between the two paradigms – but the truly insightful are those who know that such compromise can only be a holding pattern. The notion of the network is simply too powerful, and will prevail as the organising model for much that we do in future as human beings, including learning.”

Tags: netbook networkliteracy networks

Posted by: willrich

Edge 238

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:22:06 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

The amazing thing about social networks, unlike other networks that are almost as interesting — networks of neurons or genes or stars or computers or all kinds of other things one can imagine — is that the nodes of a social network — the entities, the components — are themselves sentient, acting individuals who can respond to the network and actually form it themselves.

Some level of altruism is required for networks to emerge.

We are thus at a moment where a leap forward in the methodology for the study of social networks has been made, firstly by building on past work. But secondly, we are at a moment where — because of modern telecommunications technologies and other innovations — people are leaving digital traces of where they are, who they are interacting with, and what they are saying or even thinking. All of these types of data can be captured by the deployment of what I call “massive passive” technologies and used to engage social science questions in a way that our predecessors could only dream of.

Again, the study of social networks is part of this assembly project, part of this effort to understand how you can then have the emergence of order and the emergence of new phenomena that do not inhere in the individuals.

it is critical when you think of networks to think about their dynamics. A lot of times, people fail to understand networks because they focus on the statistics. They think about topology; they think about the architecture of the network. They think about how people are connected, which is of course incredibly important and not easy to understand either. While on the one hand the topology can be understood or seen as fixed or existing, on the other hand this topology is itself mutable and changing and intriguing, and the origin of this topology and its change is itself a difficult thing.

But here is something else: Once you have recognized that there is a topology, the next thing you must understand is that there can be a contagion as well — a kind of process of flow through the network. Things move through it, and this has a different set of scientific underpinnings altogether. Understanding how things flow through the network is a different challenge from understanding how networks form or evolve. It is the difference between the formation and the operation of the network, or the difference between its structure and its function.

To us, it is a very, very fundamental observation that things happening in a social space beyond your vision — events that occur or choices that are made by people you don't know — can cascade in a conscious or subconscious way through a network and affect you.

Tags: networks

Posted by: willrich

Remote Access: Chaos Theory

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:15:02 -0000

Tags: control networks quotable shifts

Posted by: willrich

growing changing learning creating: How changes come about

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 12:55:56 -0000

Tags: change edushifts imported:del.icio.us networks shifts

Posted by: willrich

What does this have to do with instructional sequencing? If instruction is more than content, and learning is about increased development of health within a network as a whole, then sequencing needs to include interaction, dialogue, and network-related fu

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 13:10:29 -0000

Tags: learning networks theory

Posted by: willrich