Social Networking outcomes

If you had read my previous bog to this, where I presented two Social Networking diagrams, produced from the Sociomatrix data processed by Agna, then you will no doubt have been having some thoughts about the likely final outcome for the two groups. If you recall group ‘A’ displayed a very low level of social activity and group ‘B’ a far more impressive set of connections. Well here are the results.



Of course it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions from a single trial, more are needed and more will now take place, but certainly the outcome even to a casual observer produces a clear enough impression. The less well-connected group ‘A’, have between them achieved results that are skewed toward Pass and Merit, while the more active network of group ‘B’ displays a skew toward Merit and Distinction. I must say that I was more than pleased with this outcome, as it does at least on the surface appear to support the case for a more socially oriented model of learning.


One more small and possibly insignificant point is that group ‘A’ would seem to have double the amount of late assignment submissions.

You will no doubt have guessed that I have been keenly showing these results to just about anyone that will listen, and the response I must say has been very positive. Apart that is from one senior manager, who will of course remain nameless. But who pointed out somewhat reasonably, that had the outcomes for the two groups been reversed, then we might have been able to build a case for blocking access to all these Social Networking sites! And what if any are the intrinsic suggestions here I wonder, that entertainment wins out against education, perish the though.

Thoughts on Social Networking

Going on as I do these days with regard to the value of social networking tools practices and the implications for collaboration in learning, which you may well have picked this up from a number of posts in this blog. As its summer now and there are no classes, its given me time to start thinking about trying to see if I can extract anything at all meaningful from the exercise that I encouraged my year 1 level 3 students to carry out at the start of their course in September 06. In fact I did a couple of blogs on this which you can still get to from here and to save repeating myself they are:-

Tell And Post, Thursday, September 14, 2006

Social Networking So Far, Sunday, September 24, 2006


Essentially the idea was to start them off by using Moodle as a social tool and see if this had any impact of the likely emergence of online groups and ultimately outcomes. Just recently, during the summer, I have been dipping into SNA (Social Network Analysis) this is a methodology for mapping and measuring relationships and flows in a system; this can be human or even data itself. Now being a software person, my first reaction was to go looking for some tools, free ones anyway and I found Agna, a superb little piece of Java freeware. I used Moodle reports to produce a student-by-student activity for the Social forums throughout September 06. Then using their names, though for this exercise I have replaced these with numbers, as the node values in the Sociomatrix; see below.

For this simple Binary exercise I simply recorded a 1 at the intersection of contact between two students.

I carried out the exercise for two groups, who I shall simply refer to as A and B

My next stage was to use the Agna Network Viewer to produce charts.

I shall let you make up you own mind on the level of social networking taking place here, but just establish for you that the arrows indicate the direction of communication.
Well what do you think? Is any of this likely to influence outcomes for later on the course? I will reveal all a week today, on Sunday 12th August.

So long Intranet welcome DSpace

This week thanks to some major groundbreaking efforts from my fellow Moodle VLE administrator Clive, we now have our DSpace content repository accessible through common authentication with Windows Active Directory via Free Radius server. If you have been following this blog then you may recall the posting
DSpace Content Repository - Tuesday, April 12, 2005, where I reported that the system was now fully installed and rolled out for user access. Well to be honest, that turned out to be somewhat optimistic, because apart from myself, Clive and couple of other brave souls, not very much has been happening. But now that can all change, because through Clive's efforts this week not only can we offer users a common Windows Network, Moodle, DSpace login; you may like to keep up with his blog on all this. DSpace will now only allow authenticated users to access the actual content, in other words, the Meta Data is visible and will continue to be Harvested by OAIster, but only Bromley College staff and or Students can access the content. This of course overcomes one of the major concerns from staff, that their material will be open to all, regardless of Copyright or IPR. Naturally the next big bonus is that DSpace resource are now available from within Moodle; you just have to login in once at the start of your session. So goodbye to dupliacted Moodle resources, network drives, incomprehensible folder structures and ground fills of orphaned documents, from now on may DSpace and Meta Data rule.