Group items tagged

This paper explores the impact of communication media and the Internet on connectivity between people. Results from a series of social network studies of media use are used as background for exploration of these impacts. These studies explored the use of all available media among members of an academic research group and among distance learners. Asking about media use as well as about the strength of the tie between communicating pairs revealed that those more strongly tied used more media to communicate than weak ties, and that media use within groups conformed to a unidimensional scale, showing a configuration of different tiers of media use supporting social networks of different ties strengths. These results lead to a number of implications regarding media and Internet connectivity, including: how media use can be added to characteristics of social network ties; how introducing a medium can create latent tie connectivity among group members that provides the technical means for activating weak ties, and also how a change in a medium can disrupt existing weak tie networks; how the tiers of media use also suggest that certain media support different kinds of information flow; and the importance of organization-level decisions about what media to provide and promote. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for Internet effects.

Kimberly Arnold (Purdue) on Signals, John Fritz (UM, Baltimore Co), Eric Kunnen (Grand Rapids CC) on Astro Fritz refers to his presentation at EDUCAUSE 2 years ago where he presented on using Blackboard user stats (for informing faculty/departments who then analyze it) in a panel with John Campbell of Purdue who had just come out with his Signals program. 5 stages of analytics on campus (extraction/reporting, analysis/monitoring, what-if scenario building, predictive modeling/simulation, automatic triggers of business processes)