I’ve been busy writing, but recently played around with the Social Network Applet in Knowledge Forum that I blogged about in August 2006.
Paul, one of the KF programmers who created this java applet, sent me documentation on the different functionality and helped explain some questions I had. I still have much to learn about SNA, but check out the cool visualizations below, reminiscent of some visualizations Chris designed with ruby on rails (more here, and again)
The above diagram shows the density of reading among my participants in Iteration 2 is 100%. Well, since the link value is set to the default of 1, that just means that everyone read everyone else’s note at least once.
The second one is more interesting. Here are two participants who collaborated on two course assignments and for discussion facilitation. They read each other’s notes extensively– link value of 677 indicates there are 677 read links between these two. Very interactive! The next pair with a similar collaborative relationship comes in at 478 read links, and more participants as the link value decreases.
The third diagram shows the alternate display option, called spring. By 393 read links, more participants are involved.
The fourth just shows that the spring diagram above looks like as a circle diagram.
Pretty cool. I must read up on SNA after my AERA paper is done. I might start with Barry Wellman’s site
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