Social Network Theory and Web 2.0 Learning Environment

QIM 501E/4 Instructional Design and Delivery Lecturer: Dr. Balakrishnan Muniandy Social Network Theory & Web 2.0 Learning Environment

Charles Kadushin • Professor Emeritus Sociology, Graduate Center, CUNY and Distinguished Scholar, Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies • Visiting Research Professor, Sociology, Brandeis University. • Taught at Columbia University in the Sociology and Social Psychology Departments and at Yale University in the School of Management and in Graduate Sociology. • Consultant in organizational behavior, social networks and employee surveys for major international companies as well as for non-profit and non-governmental organizations. • Founder of Social Network field. • Currently writing on social network theory, Making Connections: An Introduction to Social Network Concepts, Theories and Findings. Oxford University Press.

Introduction • Social network theory is one of the few if perhaps the only theory in social science that is not reductionist. • Applies to a variety of levels of analysis from small groups to entire global systems

What is a Network? • A network is a set of relationships which contain a set of objects (in mathematical terms, nodes) and a mapping or description of relations between the objects or nodes. • The simplest network contains two objects, 1 and 2, and one relationship that links them. Nodes 1 and 2, for example, might be people, and the relationship that links them might be “are standing in the same room.”

Relationships can have direction such as 1 likes 2. In this simple network the relationship could be symmetrical or non-directional:1 and 2 like one another, or their liking is mutual. • Aside from their directionality, or lack of it, relationships might be more than the sharing of an attribute or being in the same place at the same time. There can be a flow between the objects or the nodes. Liking, for example, might lead to an exchange of gifts. Flows and exchanges can be very important in network theory. • At one level, this list of concepts of relationships between pairs of nodes is now logically complete. But consider a network between pairs that operates via an intermediary node. For example: In the diagram on the right, 1 is connected to 3 via 2. • The relationships shown are directional and not reciprocal, but they need not be. They could be non-directional or reciprocal. Consider a non-directional or reciprocal three node relationship in which 1 and 2 like one another, and 2 and 3 like one another. • Network distance between pairs of nodes can be described in terms of the number of steps or links between them. There are obviously two steps between 1 and 3. But if 1 also likes 3, the network is said to be “transitive” or balanced, and in this case all three nodes are directly linked.

Types of Networks • Ego-centric - networks that are connected with a single node or individual, for example, my good friends, or, all the companies that do business with Wigets, Inc. • Socio-centric – in Russell Bernard’s term (personal communication), networks in a box. Connection between children in a classroom, between executives or workers in an organization are closed system networks and the ones most often studied in terms of the fine points of network structure. • Open-system networks - networks in which the boundaries are not necessarily clear, they are not in a box -- for example, the elite of the United States, or connections between corporations, or the chain of influencers of a particular decision, or the adoption of new practices. These are the most interesting networks and also the most difficult to study.

Connections • Propinquity - nodes are more likely to be connected with one another, other conditions being equal, if they are geographically near to one another.(e.g. A pioneering study showed that in a new housing project for World War II veterans, persons who lived near to one another were more likely to become friends. Persons in corner housing units were more likely to be socially isolated than persons in units that lay between other units (Festinger, Schachter, and Back 1950). • Homophily - defined as having one or more common social attributes, like the same social class.Pairs can be said to be homophilous if their characteristics match in a proportion greater than expected in the population from which they are drawn or the network of which they are a part • Homophily and Connections - the greater the homophily the more likely two nodes will be connected. • Homophily and individuals - at the individual level, persons are more likely to have a connection, friendship or association, if they have common attributes (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1978). While common norms are promoted through common attributes, so are common attributes likely when association or friendship occurs as a result of co-location and commonly situated activities (Feld and Carter 1998). • Homophily and collectivities - At the organizational level, whether homophily leads to a greater likelihood of a tie depends on the kind of a connection, as well as the on the industry. • (E.g. Consider Ford, Chrysler and General Motors as having a common characteristic of being automobile manufacturers and being geographically adjacent to one another in Detroit. If the tie is selling cars to one another, there is unlikely to be a relationship. On the other hand, especially lately, engineers and managers may move from one company to another and this constitutes a tie between the automobile companies.)

This network was derived from observing babies! The arrow indicates which baby recognized which other baby. The bar shows baby C and E recognizing each other. One measure of distance is, as we noted, the shortest number of paths from one node to the other. A is three steps from I. That is, A to D to G to I. Observe that we said shortest path, because A is also two steps, not one step from D, because A can “reach” D through B. This “diversion” through B could also be counted. We might think nodes are closer to one another, however, if they have a number of redundant contacts as in A reaching D both directly and indirectly. This might make sense in the diffusion of norms, attitudes, or values. One might have to hear the same thing from several different sources until it takes root. (Note of course that we have moved to quite a different plane than the nursery depicted in the diagram above). Then too, in terms of diffusion, we might want to discount a source that is several steps removed because as in the party game of “telephone” things might get garbled as they get passed from one node to another. So one might count the first step asimportant, the next step as less important, and so on. Various analytic techniques utilize different measures of distance or closeness.

Distance between any two nodes - The distance between two nodes in a network is determined by four parameters: • the size of the first order zone of nodes in the network; • the extent to which nodes in the network have overlapping members in their first order zones; • barriers between nodes; • agency exercised by the nodes. • The Size of the Interpersonal Environment - The number of individuals in the interpersonal environment varies from about 300 to 5,000 persons, depending on how this is measured and the type of society in which the focal person is embedded (Pool and Kochen 1978; Bernard, Johnsen, Killworth, and Robinson 1989). • The Small World - If there were no overlap in people’s personal networks, then one could reach the entire population of the United States in two or three steps. (Pool and Kochen 1978). • Six Degrees of Separation - Despite the theoretical number of 2 to 3 steps between any two persons in the United States, experiments done by Stanley Milgram and his students in the 1960s estimated the actual number of steps to be six reached through five intervening persons (Milgram 1967) (Milgram 1969), and (Travers and Milgram 1969)hence the popular phrase, “six degrees of separation.” • The effective distance between nodes - While in principle there can be an infinite number of zones, (third, fourth, fifth ... n), the impact of each zone on an individual node declines exponentially. For most purposes, the number of effectively consequential zones is between two and three; that is, whatever is being studied, individuals or organizations, past the third or at most fourth zone objects or nodes have relatively small effects on the focal individual or structure.

What is an Online Social Network Site (SNS)? Accoring to boyd & Ellison (2007) SNS is a web-based service that allows individuals to: Construct a public or semipublic profile within a bounded system Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connction. View and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

Web 2.0 as a Learning Environment • Web 2.0 technologies empower learners to create personalized and community-based collaborative environments. • Social acts that bring out identities, awareness, relationships, connections, and interactions among and between learners are necessary for interactive learning. • Participatory Web 2.0 technology accentuates the features of digital multi-modals representations, and syndications to empower the learner to manage their learning spaces. • The constructs of Web 2.0 learning environments are discussed in four dimensions from a theatrical metaphor • cognitive/scripts • social/actors • networking/stages • integration/acting dimensions

Web 2.0 as a Social Networking Platform • Frequently, Web 2.0 is referred to as a platform, namely a performance area, like the stage in a theatre. • People create personas using the computer to present an “avatar” and script this persona to be pleasing to the people that view this creation during computer communications, very much like a performance in a theatre • William Shakespeare (1904) observed: “All the world’s a stage: And all the men and women merely players” • Web 2.0 environments afford learners the opportunity to learn by acting in a learning environment; thus to interact to accomplish their learning goals. • Learning begins in classroom where the teachers occupies “center stage,” while students are audiences to absorb the lessons being presented. • In Web 2.0 environments, learners and instructors are all actors because roles and acts are part of the daily drama of life. • Social acts that bring out identities, awareness, relationships, connections, and interactions among and between learners, are necessary for interactive learning. • The Web 2.0 learning environment is grounded in socio-cultural learning theory. The aim of a socio-cultural approach is to comprehend the developmental processes involved in rituals (activities), at the level of individuals (identities), social (interpersonal), and cultural (community) processes. • Web 2.0 technology aims to enhance mediated knowledge creation, information sharing, personalized structures, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of Web-based communities and hosted services, such as social networking sites, wikis, blogs, Second Life, and folksonomy.

Figure 1. Theatrical metaphor for Web 2.0 learning environments. Web 2.0 learning environments are constituted with four dimensions: cognitive dimension (scripts actors create/follow); social dimension (actors engage in social relationships); networking dimension (stages where actors perform); and interaction dimension (act that actors interact). Each individual is an actor and has self/me and identity/I. On the Web 2.0 platform/stage, each individual is allowed to craft different identities (I1, I2, I3, I4 …) to interact with other identities others have crafted. On a stage, each individual/actor joins/participates in different community/communities (communities of interest; communities of purpose; communities of passion; communities of practice) based on their needs and intentions. Actors act/collaborate in different communities. Although communities of practices (CoP) are considered the ultimate learning environment in which to engage, learners may follow different agendas to join/ participate in different communities and move to other communities. To reach CoP likely requires community members to possess similar interests, purposes, and passions.

Dimentions of Web 2.0 Learning Environments • Cognitive • Social • Networking • Integration Dimension

Cognitive Dimension • Learners create a script that directs what they will contribute, how and with whom they will contribute. • Implemented as they generate content through interactions. • Sharing, self-reflecting, negotiating and self explanation,called elaborated explanation • (Dillenbourg, Baker, Blaye, & O’Malley, 1996). Webb (1991) concluded that engaging • learners in elaborated explanation would lead to knowledge improvement because elaborated explanation ensures learners progressively integrate the process into their knowledge structures. • This can be validated by Vygotsky’s deliberate semantics (1962): the change required from maximally compact inner speech to detailed written speech. • Vratulis and Dobson (2008) concluded learners develop social relationships through social negotiations to obtain their voices (identities) in Wiki learning environments. • Blog technology allows learners to craft their identities via constant self-expressing and self-reflecting (Brescia & Miller, 2006), and/or allow other learners to comment their expression to result in actively exchanging learning processes (Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, & Wright, 2005). • This is what Gleaves, Walker, and Grey (2007) called “social reflexive criticism.” • Ellison and Wu (2008) concluded blogging enhances learners’ understanding on course content and exposes learners to more diverse viewpoints from their peers. • Blogs afford learners the opportunity to capture and maximize their reflexive criticism of the learning process.

Social Dimension • The social dimension refers to actors and their relationships to others. • This relation is explained by the causal • two-way relationship between individual and social properties, including the internalization processes associated with the development and the externalization processes whereby individuals affect social structure (Valsiner, 1998). • Social linkage and human networks become critical in Web 2.0 learning environments. These phenomena can be explained by communication theories: self-presentation, social relationship, and learners’ uniqueness.

Social Dimension - Self-presentation/identity • A fundamental process communicated in everyday life and a social act necessary to understand and examine online social interaction. • Goffman (1959, p. 67) defines self-presentation as: “the performance of an individual that accentuates certain matters and conceals others.” • Walther and • Boyd (2002) argued that there is a hyper-personal aspect to online communications in which people can be more selective about how they present themselves. • Based on Mead’s (1934) social-psychology theory, there are two phases of self: “me,” and “I.” • “Me”“reflects” the attitudes of generalized others while “I”“responds” to the attitudes of generalized others. • In learning environments, Mead’s two phases of self correlates well with Vygotsky’s two steps of the learning process. • Vygotsky (1978) states: “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (inter-psychological) and then inside the child (intra-psychological)” (p. 57). In other words, the inter-psychological process refers to “I” while the intrapsychological process refers to “me.”

Social Dimension - Self-presentation/identity • Web 2.0 learners create, manage, cultivate, and share their postings and profile(s) to project their ideal social identities as part of a social networking process. This is called selfpresentation management. • Learners engage in blogs, wikis, personal homepages, digital diaries, and social network sites to enhance self-expression (Ducate & Lomicka, 2008), selfreflection (Brescia & Miller, 2006), and personal voices by social negotiations (Vratulis & Dobson, 2008).

Social Dimension – Learners’ Uniqueness • Each online learner is a unique learner because of the cultural and historical milieu encountered in social learning environments. • Research indicated that learners with more experience and autonomy of use are more likely to employ Web 2.0 technologies while women are more likely to use social network sites than their male counterparts (Hargittai, 2007). • People often use SNS to connect with those in their existing networks, rather than to seek out new friends and acquaintances (Ellison & Wu, 2008).

Social Dimension – Social Relationship • Social relationships are not simply limited • to between/among learners, but apply to relationships between/among learners, social tools, and social environments. • Social relationships can promote affection, information, and trust relationships, and effective relationship management. • Social relationships could enhance and/or inhibit social interaction in Web 2.0 environments. • Herring et al. (2007) found that comments written by adults tended to be ignored and/or exterminated the ongoing discussions, explained by the students’ perception of adults as intrusive and evidence that the students felt a sense of ownership of the blog conversations. • This is validated by Wagner and Majchrzak’s (2006) different social status and Tu, Blocher, and Ntoruru’s study (2008) that concluded an authority relationship has been considered an obstacle to interaction, since authority, sense of being offensive, the thought of vandalizing, and social norms are critical. • Trust is critical in establishing a new social relationship (Brown, Collins, & Daguid, 1989; Pea, 1993) and to ensure positive and active social relationship. • Trust relationship goes beyond other learners and extends to trust with tools and environments. It imposes negative emotion to learners when learners sense and fear an unknown in learning environments. • Privacy is a challenging issue in Web 2.0 environments, since learners self-disclose, self-reflect to make their social participations in public.

Networking Dimension • The networking dimension refers to network technology architecture/ stage that empowers actors/learners with advanced mechanisms/ props/ tools to learn/perform. • Wiki technology affords participants to be able to weave, design, and tailor clothing; blog allows learners to select different clothing, while Second Life allows learners to act on a virtual stage. • The ability to capture and visualize communication (Kim, 2008) and mental model trails is crucial in Web 2.0 learning environments, allowing learners to trace the ramifications of thought processes and learn by examining their own thinking. • Lamb (2004) observed four critical wiki features associated with learning: (1) data storage, able to be edited by learners; (2) simplified hypertext markup promotes close reading, revision, and tracking of drafts; (3) empowers users – content is ego-less, time-less, and in-flux, organized by context, by links in and links out (flat-structures), and by whatever categories or concepts that emerge in the authoring process; (4) distributed communities linked by RSS allow learners to determine the structures of content and knowledge, and therefore, the structures can be seen as visualizing human mental models. • In Web 2.0 environments, content is organized by learners via flag-structures and tags, which are considered “multiple mental notes” (Baird & Fisher, 2005). They only make sense to learners specifically. • In a social bookmarking system, learners work as collaborative teams of information architects, assigning tags, structuring, and organizing the information in a manner that best reflects their mental models. Learners spontaneously categorize information in a non-hierarchal manner known as folksonomy. • Rooted in constructivist theory (Baird & Fisher, 2005), social bookmarking is designed to act only as a facilitator, providing learners with the tools to chunk, scaffold, and/or organize information in a format that best suits the learners.

Integration Dimension • The integration dimension refers to actors/learners performing/engaging in activities. • Depending on the contexts, sometimes actors/learners have many active and interactive acts/activities in which to perform/engage while sometimes they may have less. It is critical that all interactions should engage learners in collaborative and community-related activities because acting/learning is a social ritual.

Integration Dimension - Collaboration • Collaboration could range from collaborating with selves to others in meaningful and authentic/situated activities. Meaningful and authentic activities bond learners and 264 C.-H. Tu et al. instructors collectively to catalyze social interaction into skills and knowledge acquisition. • Online socio-cultural learning that emphasizes collaborative, meaningful, and authentic learning activities could be effective strategies to improve learning. • Situated cognition theory (Lave, 1988) states that the environment is an integral part of cognitive activity, and not merely a set of circumstances in which context-independent cognitive processes/activities are performed. • Web 2.0 environments are frequently referred to as a collaboration Web (Educause, 2008). • Web learners (Web collaborators) engage in meaningful and authentic Web activities. • Web 2.0 tools for collaborative work are simple, flexible, and free, and offer a familiar Web interface. • Wiki, an advanced online authoring system, empowers students within collaborative or co-constructed activities (Farabaugh, 2007). • Mak & Coniam (2008) placed authentic writing, situated within the domains of creativity and task-based learning, in ESL learning by integrating wiki technology. • They concluded that by collaborating within a wiki, learners produce a greater quantity of coherent and accurate texts in specific audiences (their parents; peer review), resulting in them being creative and authentic writing. • They concluded collaborative Web is a rewarding experience for language learners.

Integration Dimension - Community • Online learning community, by accentuating the scaffolding approach could, potentially, create dynamic social interaction to engender positive social acts with others. • Online learners are involved in a distributed model of cognition (Pea, 1993) that is embedded in cultural–historical tradition based on Vygotsky’s theory (1978). • A learning community goes beyond learners getting together to learn. Four different types of learning communities (Carotenuto et al., 1999) are identified to obtain a better understanding of how community members process and engage in community activities: communities of interest, communities of purpose, communities of passion, and communities of practice (CoP). • In communities of interest, learners share common backgrounds/interests, which are of a more diffused focus. • In communities of purpose, members share a common desire to focus on specific interests of organizations/groups as a whole and are frequently derived from a wider range of backgrounds than a CoP; therefore, they are less likely to have a deeply shared view of the way things are. • In communities of passion, members focus on a specific interest to the point of becoming passionate advocates. • In communities of practice, members have a tight focus on a common set of activities or practices and share common or related professional responsibilities or activities. • On a theatrical stage, these four types of communities may be thought of as wings that allow actors to move around from one stage to another, or community to community. • In social learning environments, learners choose how/where/when they would to act in these communities.

Learning Community and Community Learning • There are two facets that influence a learning community: learning community and community learning. • A learning community is seen as a community for participants to learn together where learning is gained horizontally. • In community learning, learning is gained both horizontally and vertically. Community members learn and the community, itself, learns. • The model that stretches learning from a school learning community to lifelong learning is a good example of the relationship between learning community and community learning. • One example of focusing on both individual learning and community learning is the Global Textbook Project that applies wiki-based technology to compose textbooks at the University of Georgia (http://globaltext.org/).

Conclusion • Life is a drama while learning is a social act. People are consistently looking for the answer to the question, “who am I?” Therefore, we diligently interact with others and different environments by employing different mediated tools. For example, we communicate with others, read, travel to become inspired by different objectives, things, and environments. That is the reason why we never stop acting on the world stage because we are looking for and trying to understand “self.” Web 2.0 technologies afford the capability and capacity to distill self into “I” (identities) to assist us to better understand who we are. It is important not to forget why we interact. Although knowledge is what all learners are pursuing, without our “selves,” knowledge wouldn’t exist at all. The social network surrounds mankind not knowledge. Web 2.0 technology may have been shaping the ways we communicate and present ourselves, but It is the time for us to ask how we shape and craft our social Webs. “I” is a synthesis produced by thinking from self. Through creating multiple “Is,” we re-create selves constantly in a continuous process of self-overcoming and self-improving from moment to moment. Dharma Master Cheng-Yen offers this enlightenment: the real self is identity-less and shape-less because a true self can be any identity and any shape. With this process, we are able to reach a social life of excellence.

References • Charles Kadushin (14 February 2004). Introduction to Social Network Theory.Chapter 2. Some Basic Network Concepts and Propositions. • Chih-Hsiung Tua*, Michael Blochera and Gayle Robertsb (23 October 2008). Constructs for Web 2.0 learning environments: a theatrical Metaphor.Educational Media International, Vol. 45, No. 4, December 2008, 253–269. • Christine Greenhow, Beth 2009). Old Communication, New Literacies: Social Network Sites as Social Learning Resources.Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Special Edition, (2009) 1130–1161. 2009 International Communication Association.

Social Network Theory and Web 2.0 Learning Environment