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“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.”

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.

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. 

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.