Topic 10 exercise 1: Social Networks Case Study
Posted by iandonaldson on October 21, 2007
Patterns of people interactions within the weekly POD sessions:
The social network matrix and diagrams illustrate some recurring patterns:
- Hopper who announces the agenda has (implicit) interaction with everybody else.
- Some people interact (respond) more than others
- Most people interact with Hopper, i.e. respond to a question or prompt.
- Some people interact with some specific others, a pattern within this appears to be a) people within the same POD group in regard to some related task b) some shared experience, c) humour/rapport d) and other incidental purposes.
- Some people don’t interact with some specific others within the dialogue.
- Some peoples interaction contains significantly more use of emoting than others.
5.1 If the analysis were performed on another topic extract the same patterns could generally be found. However there could also be significant variation depending on the following observed conditions:
- Attendence (non attendance, attendance of other session, lateness)
- Participation (there but doing something else, connection drop out, illness)
- Delegation (assigning tasks, e.g. running a section/agenda to somebody else)
- Mood (wide range: low spirited DE students with flu [low level and reluctant participation], jovial high sprited DE student about to graduate [won't shutup], etc)
5.2 Referencing – Pending
5.3 I contend that the CSCW MOO session logs are an example of a complex system in social network analysis. Because it contains the hallmarks such as recurring patterns of interactions but which can vary signifinicantly subject to too many variables to truly track or control.
