Air Skyping by MeshForum 2005 speakers

Two speakers from MeshForum 2005 made it into the Money Section of USA Today.

To quote from the piece:

Edward Vielmetti does exactly that on his blog. Vielmetti runs The Vacuum Group, a networking service in Ann Arbor, Mich. "I spoke with Valdis Krebs this afternoon, who was high over the Atlantic flying SAS on his way home from Eastern Europe," Vielmetti writes.

Krebs is the developer of InFlow, which he bills as "software for social network analysis," whatever that means.

"He was talking to me using Skype, and not paying anything extra for the call," Vielmetti writes. "Skype sound quality was as good as ever — he didn't have a separate mic and was just using the built-in on his Mac PowerBook."

So, clearly at least one columnist from Money doesn't yet know what social networks and mapping them means... but still, good to see two speakers from MeshForum quoted talking to each other.

Connectivism: Learning as Network-Creation

George Siemens has an article in ASTD's Learning Circuits, "Connectivism: Learning as Network-Creation"

The domain of learning is significantly hampered by progressive revisions of what it means to learn, to know, and to understand. A subset of connectivism, network forming, is presented as an accurate model for addressing how people learn. The test of any theory is the degree to which it solves problems and incongruities within a domain. The shortcomings of behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist ideologies of learning are answered in light of learning as a connection-forming (network-creation) process.

Personal network archeology

Bruce Hoppe writes The "Steinway" of networking strategies

I consolidated my rolodex last weekend in anticipation of sending holiday cards. As I was double-checking contact information, I reflected on how I originally met each person in my life. Did I meet them randomly, as part of a group, or perhaps through a specific introduction?

Check out the network drawing he made.

I heard a very similar comment at a conference recently.  The person had dug through their client list attempting to figure out how the contact with the client was established.  He figured he had five or six sources.

Danah Boyd on Friendster

Danah Boyd has published a collection of herFriendster publications on Many-to-Many:.

These are all well worth reading and looking over as they represent a collection of serious studies over multiple years of one of the larger of the social networks.

Tremor using SNA for Marketing

elearnspace: Social Networks

Two things have consumed my attention over the last few years: how we learn and how knowledge flows in networks. Social network analysis (SNA)- an extremely simple, but powerful idea - is one of the best ways we can currently measure how knowledge flows in certain groups (though we haven't yet applied this to learning). Tremor uses an interesting application of SNA for marketing. Situated cognition (or other terms reflective of being able to understand based on context) is giving way to network cognition - the notion that our understanding is more a function of a network than our current context.

Moving experts listing

We've removed the "experts" category, as this caused some confusion. Most of the experts are associated with social networking, and we have kept the listing for posterity: MeshForum: experts listing.

Survey of SNA resources

Colabria gives us a nice survey of the field. Social Networks

Relationships and Network Theory
Social Networks are used to effectively map and measure networks, knowledge flows and relationships in organizations, communities and other complex human systems. These practical methods are highly instrumental in building and optimizing the dynamic knowledge ecosystems essential to productivity, innovation and the future of all knowledge-based organizations.