Social networks

Up until this week’s reading, I have only been thinking about online learning environments as isolated social networks. But as suggested by Garton, Haythornthwaite and Wellman, people can be connected together by one or more relations. So if students are collaborating, whether online or in a face-to-face setting, and working towards a common goal, that does not prevent them from also being connected through a networking site like Facebook. This is especially true as it is so easy to connect with someone through a networking site.

Donath and Boyd argue that “a public display of connections is an implicit verification of identity”, which seems to imply that people will more easily trust each other. Trust is an important factor when it comes to collaboration, so does that mean that networking sites like MySpace or Facebook could enhance the effectiveness of computer-supported collaborative learning environments? This may be true for students but may also cause difficulties between teachers and their students (as networking sites display a lot of personal information).

A solution proposed by Donath and Boyd is “the ability to define a set of categories and designate each person as a member of one or more of these categories”. Thus one could differentiate a work colleague from a close friend, a family member from a stranger and a student from a teacher. I’m not sure if this design solution has been implemented yet, but it would be interesting to see if it could work.

Leaving this topic, Barabasi made an interesting analogy between a handful of people acting as connectors and a handful of websites considered as hubs (i.e. as very highly connected). In this light, democracy on the web seems to be an illusion. Most of us can publish, true, but most of us are invisible…