Group items tagged

Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis [ONA].

NetMiner is an innovative software tool for Exploratory Analysis and Visualization of Network Data. NetMiner allows you to explore your network data visually and interactively, and helps you to detect underlying patterns and structures of the network

What new things could we discover if social network analysis took time and space into account, in addition to the raw connections between people?

Program for Large Network Analysis

Analysis of 1,461 Blackboard courses. D & F students used CMS 47% less than students earning a C or higher. LAK11 http://tinyurl.com/4fp7oyk

UCINET is a social network analysis program developed by Steve Borgatti, Martin Everett and Lin Freeman. The program is distributed by Analytic Technologies. UCINET works in tandem with freeware program called NETDRAW for visualizing networks. NETDRAW is installed automatically with UCINET.

A data analysis service for the learning science community

Learning analytics is the use of intelligent data, learner-produced data, and analysis models to discover information and social connections, and to predict and advise on learning. EDUCAUSE's Next Generation learning initiative offers a slightly different definition "the use of data and models to predict student progress and performance, and the ability to act on that information". Their definition is cleaner than the one I offer, but, as I'll detail below, is intended to work within the existing educational system, rather than to modify it. I'm interested in how learning analytics can restructure the process of teaching, learning, and administration.

After visualizing chat room dialogue earlier this week, I thought it might be neat to try and visualize some Twitter dialogue from the #LAK11 course.  For some reason I thought it would be simple to extract tweets from Twitter for analysis.  It wasn't!  So if you happen to know an easier way please leave a comment.

As the integration of community-centred teaching practices intensifies, an understanding of the types of relationships that manifest in this network and the associated impact on student learning is required. This paper explores the relationship between a student's position in a classroom social network and their reported level of sense of community. Quantitative methods, such as Rovai's (2002b) Classroom Community Scale and social network centrality measures, were incorporated to evaluate an individual's level of sense of community and their position within the classroom social network. Qualitative methods such as discussion forum content analysis and student interviews were adopted to clarify and further inform this relationship. The results demonstrate that the centrality measures of  closeness and  degrees are positive predictors of an individual's reported sense of community whereas,  betweenness indicates a negative correlation. Qualitative analyses indicate that an individual's pre-existing external social network influences the type of support and information exchanges an individual requires and therefore, the degree of sense of community ultimately experienced. The paper concludes by discussing future recommendations for teaching practices incorporating computer-mediated communications. 

generating word clouds, interesting as a game, as analysis can be very simple, depending on what you want to search.

"IN-SPIRE™ -- an information visualization software application -- provides a wealth of tools for exploring textual information, including query, subset, and trend analysis tools. Through visual representations of information, users can rapidly discover hidden information relationships from a variety of data sources such as technical and patent literature, marketing and business documents, web data, accident and safety reports, newswire feeds and e-mail message traffic."

Data alone isn't the answer. In fact, from a business perspective, the data is still part of problem. Insight is the answer, which is derived from the data.

"This study analyzes the outcomes at more than 380 higher education institutions. It looks at what the chosen strategies have accomplished, in what ways institutions use the data they collect, whether institutions are investing more resources in tools that enable them to collect and manipulate management information, and the degree to which information and analysis are being used to support institutional decision making."

Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.