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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. 

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].

NodeXL is a template for Excel 2007 and 2010 that lets you enter a network edge list, click a button, and see the network graph, all in the Excel window. You can easily customize the graph's appearance; zoom, scale and pan the graph; dynamically filter vertices and edges; alter the graph's layout; find clusters of related vertices; and calculate a set of graph metrics. Networks can be imported from and exported to a variety of data formats, and built-in connections for getting networks from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and your local email are provided.

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

conduct research on behavioural and social network analytics and behavioural experiments so as to discover and harness the laws of information network evolution for networks of people, organisations

Program for Large Network Analysis

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.

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

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

BusinessWeek's 2006 Cover Story, "Math Will Rock Your World," announced a new age of numbers. With the rise of new networks, the story argued, all of us were channeling the details of our lives into vast databases. Every credit-card purchase, every cell-phone call, every click on the computer mouse fed these digital troves. Those with the tools and skills to make sense of them could begin to decipher our movements, desires, diseases, and shopping habits-and predict our behavior. This promised to transform business and society. In a book expanding upon this Cover Story, The Numerati, Senior Writer Stephen Baker introduces us to the mathematical wizards who are digging through our data to decode us as patients, shoppers, voters, potential terrorists-even lovers.

From retailing to counterterrorism, the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly useful

A SNA tool that can work with several LMSs. It works as bookmarklet. (via @laurapasquini)

Summify automatically identifies the most important news stories for you across all of your social networks and delivers to you a personalized email digest in your inbox.

Kynetx, Inc. is a privately-held Platform as a Service (PaaS) company based in Lehi, Utah. It provides a development platform for context automation that is the first of its kind. The platform uses Kynetx Network Services to supply tools to developers to create context-aware applications that can run on a multitude of devices, including browsers, mobile phones, and desktops.

With so much technology and networking available at such low cost, what wouldn't you enhance? What wouldn't you connect? What information wouldn't you mine for insight? What service wouldn't you provide a customer, a citizen, a student or a patient?

I've been following developments in intelligent tutoring systems for a while,  and find it interesting to see how researchers are combining artificial intelligence, learning theory, affective computing, and sensor networks to create applications that might prove to be useful and effective.