COIN Course 2009

February 8th 2010

Identifying and Analyzing Educational Innovation Through Semantic SNA

Melina Beckera*, Gloria Buscheb, Dustin Larimerc
University of Cologne, Franzstr. 37, Cologne 50935, Germany University of Cologne, Paulshofstr. 15, Cologne 50767, Germany c Savannah College of Art and Design, 413 Whitaker St.,Upper, Savannah GA 31401,USA
b a

Abstract

In this paper we describe a project measuring educational innovativeness of students and teachers through their online social networking structure. We analyze the online social network of the collaborative learning platform educanet.ch, which has been developed by the Swiss educational ministry as a collaboration tool for K1-12 teachers and students. We measure the linking structure of the publicly accessible part of educanet, and compare it with the link structure of Swiss private schools. We notice a huge discrepancy between highly linked private schools, and the sparsely linked public educanet. In particular, links are only between schools, i.e. teachers, and not between students. There are for example no links from Facebook to educanet. One conclusion therefore is that students are not using educanet for collaboration. In one subproject we focused on the density of the network as well as the density of the different language sub networks in trilingual Switzerland (German, French, Italian). We correlated networking structure of schools with their success rate in the ETH Swiss high school ranking, to evaluate if higher interconnection implied greater success and excellence within the network. To find global educational innovations, we identified trends and trendsetters on the global educational forum TakingItGlobal through dynamic social network analysis, calculating the most central participants, and analyzing their interests and discussion topics
Keywords: social network analysis; education; innovation; trend;

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: melinabecker@gmx.net. Corresponding author. E-mail address: gloria.busche@hotmail.de. Corresponding author. E-mail address: dustinlarimer@gmail.com.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ....................................................................................................................................3 1. INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................................................4 2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS .......................................................................................................................................5 3. LITERATURE REVIEW ..........................................................................................................................................6 4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ..............................................................................................................................8 4.1 RESOURCES & TOOLS ........................................................................................................................................8 4.1.1 CONDOR .............................................................................................................................................................8 4.2 EDUCANET ..........................................................................................................................................................10 4.2.1 DATA COLLECTION .......................................................................................................................................10 4.3 TAKINGITGLOBAL ............................................................................................................................................11 4.3.1 DATA COLLECTION & DATABASE DESIGN .............................................................................................12 4.3.2 POPULATION AND SAMPLING ....................................................................................................................13 5. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS .......................................................................................................................................14 5.1 EDUCANET RESULTS .......................................................................................................................................14 5.1.1 IDENTIFYING ACTORS WITHIN EDUCANET ............................................................................................14 5.1.2 SEGMENTING EDUCANET BY LANGUAGE ..............................................................................................15 5.1.3 CORRELATING INTERCONNECTIVITY WITH PERFORMANCE ............................................................18 5.2 TAKINGITGLOBAL RESULTS ..........................................................................................................................23 5.2.1 IDENTIFYING TIG COMMUNICATION NETWORK ...................................................................................23 5.2.2 IDENTIFYING TOP BETWEENERS ...............................................................................................................23 5.2.3 IDENTIFYING TOP CONTRIBUTORS ...........................................................................................................26 5.2.4 IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS OF INNOVATORS.............................................................................28 5.2.5 IDENTIFYING TRENDS IN TERMINOLOGY ON TAKINGITGLOBAL ....................................................29 5.2.6 COMPARING TRENDS WITH THE HORIZON REPORT .............................................................................33 5.2.7 TOPICS RELATED TO THE MOST INNOVATIVE MEMBERS ..................................................................41 7. DISCUSSION ..........................................................................................................................................................45 8. CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................................................47 8.REFERENCES .........................................................................................................................................................48

I. List of Abbreviations
CKN CLN COIN CSV ETH HTML MIT SNA SQL TIG Collaborative Knowledge Network Collaborative Learning Network Collaborative Innovation Network Comma Separated Values Eidgenssische Technische Hochschule Zrich Hypertext Markup Language Massachusetts Institute of Technology Social Network Analysis Structured Query Language Taking IT Global (www.TakingITGlobal.com)

1. Introduction
Our world today is a very different place than it was fifteen, ten or even five years ago. The internet has permeated nearly every aspect of modern life, resulting in a new hyper-connected society and unleashing a virtual torrent of communication, international and interdisciplinary collaboration, value creation and content distribution. The rate of change almost seems to increase daily as the growing ubiquity and portability of information and the ease of access to technology diminishes barriers to participation. Just as this revolution of interconnectivity made its mark on both the participants and bystanders of its inception, it has also set new expectations for future generations preparing to find their place in its wake. Like many organizations today, educational institutions are looking for innovative ways to apply information and communication technology, both to strengthen the learning experience and to better prepare their students for success in a highly collaborative network society. This paper will analyze the collaborative innovation networks Educanet2.ch and TakingITGlobal.com to discover the characteristics of innovative participants and to attempt to identify emerging patterns of behavior and trends within online learning communities. We will first outline a series of research questions which we will attempt to answer, then establish the core concepts of social network analysis and explain learning as a social practice. We will review our research methodology, execute our research tasks, interpret and discuss our findings and conclude with any implications, recommendations or future research opportunities that may result from our work.

2. Research Questions
1. Can we identify and measure innovativeness in learning by studying the online networks of learning communities? An online learning community is essentially a collaborative innovation network. Communication between those near the core creates and exchanges significant meaning (really cool ideas, exciting projects, reports, etc.) which acts as a point of gravity, attracting interest and attention from outside the core in the form of a collaborative knowledge network and a collaborative interest network. By identifying swarms of activity within these networks we should be able to find the most innovative members and their innovative ideas. 2. Can we identify characteristics of innovative members in these networks? Not all members are equal. Once we identify the most active, innovative members we should be able to highlight characteristics of their participation in their respective online communities that differentiate them from other members of the network. Such variables include betweenness value, communication frequency and contribution index. 3. Can we identify trends as they emerge from these online networks? By observing term use and frequency within these networks we should be able to recognize trending topics as they emerge over time. We expect to identify growth or decline in member participation and community population. 4. Does a correlation exist between student participation in the Educanet network and student examination performance? The ultimate criteria for the success of a learning resource like Educanet is that it somehow enhances the learning experience and improves students performance. By comparing network activity of Educanet-enabled schools with an academic performance metric we should be able to validate or invalidate Educanets ability to have a positive impact on student performance. 5. Can we identify educational trends as predicted by other sources in TIG? We will try to confirm predictions of other research efforts by analyzing and comparing term use and frequency in the TakingITGlobal discussion board with that of educational trend reports.

3. Literature Review
If we intend to analyze virtual collaboration in online learning networks, then we first need to understand what learning is. It is commonly held that learning is simply the result of teaching, but that couldnt be further from the truth. By starting from a foundation of learning as a social process we create for ourselves a systemic framework for understanding social organization and behavior that not only holds up in the chaotic new context of the world wide web, but quite effectively extends into social network analysis and online Collaborative Innovation Networks, which we will also define and discuss shortly. Sociality allows many organisms to exist and thrive as if they were one; intelligently interacting with and adapting to variable forces from the outside world as a creative, living system (Capra, p.35). One important characteristic of a living system is that it has a permeable boundary, giving it identity and allowing it to remain organizationally closed, but materially and energetically open. The other important characteristic of a living system is that it has an internal metabolic process of self-assembly, known as autopoiesis, converting food into new structure and old structure into waste (Capra, p.8-11). These factors create what is known as a dissipative structure an open system that maintains stability far from equilibrium. When an influx of energy (in the form of food, heat, light, stress or any other type of stimuli) destabilizes the system it will either collapse or branch off into a new state of being where a new form of order may emerge (Capra, p.13-14). Extensible to any level of complexity, this simple model illustrates the dynamic origin of development, learning and evolution (Capra,p. 14). Learning, as explained by sociologist Etienne Wenger, is at its core a process of social participation by people engaged in a shared pursuit over time (1997). Communication lends us the evolutionary advantage of coordinating our behavior by exchanging meaning specifically, through various means of abstraction such as language or gesture (Capra, p.53). The resulting collision between the inner world of ideas, images and symbols and the reality of the physical environment creates a significant amount of friction. And so, together in practice we create and negotiate meaning in order to reason with the world, and complex webs of identity to reason with each other (Wenger, p.51, 149). Without meaning, there is no cause for action; no common practice to bind us together (Capra, p.83, 91). When there is meaning it exists as a product of its negotiation (Wenger, p.54). We produce meanings that extend, redirect, dismiss, reinterpret, modify or confirm in a word, negotiate anew the histories of meanings of which they are part. In this sense, living is a constant process of negotiation of meaning. (Wenger, p.52-53) The negotiation of meaning is comprised of two distinct processes: participation, which Wenger defines as the act of being engaged in a shared social enterprise, and reification: to treat an abstract concept as if it were an existing object (Wenger, p.57-59). Meaning is projected onto the world and given substance so that we may reason with it (Wenger, p.59). As stated before, a social system is fundamentally a living system, and is therefore a learning system. By engaging jointly within a group, members experience a shared context of participation and are able to identify with each other (Wenger, p.73). As that group participates in its shared venture, concepts, ideas, images, stories, tools, writings and policies are created, named, built, interpreted, related, recorded, reinterpreted, designed and redesigned in the all-encompassing process of reification (Wenger, p.59). Even ideas or drawings that seem to be entirely of a single persons effort are in fact the socially constructed result of collaboration (Sawyer, p.132). Experience within a community establishes competence, which in turn enables new opportunities for experience (Wenger, p138). Learning, as we know it, occurs as this cycle persists over a period time. Through this mutual engagement in a joint enterprise a community of practice emerges and develops a shared way of doing things based on a shared history of learning (Wenger, p.73-85). Therefore, we learn by doing and becoming; actually participating in the practice that we wish to join and negotiating meaning with the community, rather than simply reading about what it happens to do. The communitys shared history is inherently ambiguous and open for renegotiation, creating the conditions for the spontaneous emergence of new meaning (Wenger, p.83). Sparks of insight shared between group members cause concepts, ideas, components, tools, and images to be spontaneously reinterpreted, remixed, mashed together or deconstructed to embody and communicate new meaning. As Keith Sawyer says in his book Group Genius, Conversation is the source of the minds concepts (2007). The emergence of new meaning also known as creativity occurs through four processes that are quite common in everyday experience: conceptual transfer, conceptual combination, conceptual elaboration, and concept creation (Sawyer, p.110). Conceptual transfer, or analogical thinking, is the transfer of a foreign concept to another context, and is responsible for most original, creative ideas (Sawyer, p.111-112). Once again, experience plays a critical role in learning, as a greater awareness

of possible analogies creates a greater possibility for problem-finding/problem-solving flashes of insight that feed into the innovative engine of the community (Sawyer, p.124-125). Through time and effort communities engaged in a shared practice, renegotiating an ever-growing history of learning, give rise to countless original, creative ideas as they make their way in the world. Our world today is a very different place than it was fifteen, ten or even five years ago. The internet has permeated nearly every aspect of modern life, resulting in a new hyper-connected society and unleashing a virtual torrent of communication, international and interdisciplinary collaboration, value creation and content distribution. There is an unimaginably large online population co-creating and renegotiating meaning, reflected by a vast ocean of reified ideas, articles, symbols, writings, images, products, tools and other such artifacts of their participation. Individuals with similar interests inevitably find each other and begin sharing in common pursuits. Communities of practice emerge in this virtual space in much the same way as they do in the physical world: groups maintain mutual engagement in a joint venture over a long enough time span to establish a shared history of learning, resulting in original creativity and genuine innovation. These Collaborative Innovation Networks (COIN), as coined by Peter Gloor, lead research scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MITs Sloan School of Management, are cyberteams of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving a common goal an innovation by sharing ideas, information, and work (2007). Being a social species, human communication reflects similar emergent patterns of behavior as those seen in swarming organisms such as bees and migratory birds. The dynamic topography of our social landscape sets the stage for a rich collage of perspectives, motivations and norms that, while suggesting extreme discontinuity closeup, even out into recognizable, seemingly intelligent patterns of unified behavior from a far enough vantage point. The diffusion of meaning through our diverse social webs is anything but linear or orderly, but swarming behavior can be identified and forecasted as people begin gravitating around original, innovative ideas and the COINs who bring them to fruition (Gloor, p.45-46). Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the quantitative study of relational ties between actors within a network so as to observe and visualize the nonlinear structures and modes of relationships between groups of network actors, providing a window into the emergent structures, behaviors and trends within (Wasserman & Faust, p.4). Social network is essentially a defined collection of actors in a network and the many possible relations that bind them together. An actor is quite simply a social entity, which could be a person, a document, an institution, a word, or any other entity capable of being bound to another by a relational tie (Wasserman & Faust, p.17). The specific type of relational tie also has a range of possibilities, including friendship, affiliation, a transfer of resources, physical connections, kinship, or migration, to name a few (Wasserman & Faust, p.18). When graphically represented, actors are depicted by nodes that are positioned apart from each other according to the intensity of their relation. Two actors that are extensively or frequently related in some way would appear closer together than to another of lesser relation (Gloor, p.164). An actors importance can be determined by calculating its position within its social network. For example, the frequency with which one actor references several other actors does little for its own particular significance, however the frequency with which several actors reference one actor greatly enhances the significance and influence of that particular actor within the network (Gloor, p.152, 164). This concept can be applied within constrained actor sets to discover thought leaders and trendsetters, popular topics or products, or as is the goal of our study innovation in an educational network, emerging trends in a global youth forum, and the innovative youth who are behind it all.

4. Research Methodology
We have selected two networks as the focus of our study: Educanet2.ch, a web-based educational network commissioned by the Swiss government, and TakingITGlobal.com, an open online community of young people from around the world. These two networks are diametrical opposites in terms of their origins and intentions: the former being a planned institutional system with a predetermined meaning and rules for engagement, the latter a public, open community where young people freely communicate and engage issues relevant to their own contexts.

4.1 Resources & Tools 4.1.1 Condor

Our analyses require complex mathematical computation so much of the heavy lifting will be handled by a sophisticated program called Condor, developed by Peter Gloor at MIT and several colleagues from the University of Helsinki and the University of Cologne. Condor allows you to create visual maps, movies and many graph metrics of relationships. Relationships can come from social networks, web site link structures, concept maps of unstructured documents, online forums, phone archives, email networks, and many more. (Condor Manual , p.4) Condor includes a Blog Collector feature which crawls the web by querying major search engines for the most relevant results of a given set of terms and aggregates the data that is returned. If additional degrees of separation are desired, Condor will run an additional query for each of the results of each initial query and integrate these additional results into the collection. Condor then analyzes and visualizes the complex array of relations that occur between actors within the collection to calculate contribution indices, betweenness centrality and degree centrality, allowing us to identify patterns such as emergent social clustering and communication frequency. We can also identify the most influential actors within a network as well as specific social roles, like bottlenecks or brokers, based on an actors position within the flow of information. All of this data is stored in SQL syntax, allowing for easy preparation, restructuring, extraction and integration with other resources such as Microsoft Excel. We will utilize Condors Static Communication View feature to render graphic snapshots of our data indiscriminate of time. Nodes are connected by colored edges, each representing an instance of communication. Distance between nodes represents connection frequency, so the closer two nodes are to each other, the higher the frequency of communication. We will also utilize Condors Term View feature creates a network based on the frequency and association of terms used communication. For example, Figures 4.1.1-1 and 4.1.1-2 show two indepedent communication views of the results for two educational institutions in Switzerland. A.S.C. Langues appears to be very well-connected on the open web, suggesting there is a lot of interest swarming around it, while Minerva Schulen Basel, on the other hand, does not.

Figure 4.1.1-1. Communication view of results for A.S.C. Langues

Figure 4.1.1-2. Communication view of results for Minerva Schulen Basel

Condor has several key mathematical functions that will be used extensively in our analyses of the aforementioned networks: betweenness centrality , degree centrality , and contribution index. Betweenness centrality ranks the importance of a node by determining how many shortest paths between all nodes run over each specific node. A node positioned the shortest distance from all other nodes is more central, and thus has a higher betweenness centrality. Condor can display this value in an exported textile or can visualize a nodes betweenness relative to others by its size. These values are normalized by dividing the result by the number of pairs of nodes which do not include the current node.

se number of shortest geodesic path from node to node se() number of shortest geodesic paths from node to node that pass node

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Degree centrality ranks nodes by how many other nodes they are connected with. This is useful for filtering an actor set to view only the most connected nodes or to remove nodes that are not connected at all. =

Contribution index measures the contributions of members within a network by dividing the difference between messages sent and received by the total sent and received, resulting in a graphic representation of the ratio of sent messages to received messages relative to overall message activity. A high frequency of balanced sending and receiving is ideal. = In addition to using Condor, the TIG analyses will also require a custom crawler/parser which will be explained in detail in Section 4.3.1.

4.2 Educanet
Educanet allows both students and faculty to create, publish and share information online with the intention of fostering collaboration and enhancing the education of students all across the Swiss education system. We will not have access to the internal databases that comprise the complete Educanet network, but we will be able to analyze the content which students and faculty have already chosen to publish to the open web. If there are any cool ideas or innovative new concepts in that published cloud of public content they will draw attention to themselves in the form of shared links, references, reviews or spikes in web traffic. Popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search have built empires upon their ability to index and track these variables to filter what is interesting from what is not.

4.2.1 Data Collection

We can only study Educanet if we can identify and isolate it within the virtual white noise of the open web. Public school content on the Educanet network consistently includes a very specific url segment /.ws_gen/ and is always served from a Swiss domain extension. By querying a term combined with .ws_gen site:ch we are able to effectively filter the scope of our search to pages within the Educanet domain or its many various sub domains. It is important to note that schools, teachers, students and artifacts will all appear as actors within this network, since an interesting link could just as commonly reference a student profile as it could a school calendar. Since Switzerland is a trilingual nation, online communication appears in either German, French or Italian, so only specific query terminology will yield useful results. We will attempt to isolate segments of Educanet based on language by conducting a series of queries, each including one of five most frequently used words from each language as a key, such as das .ws_gen site:ch. This will ensure that the query only returns pages from within the Educanet domain which include these very common words somewhere in the content. All queries for this phase will be conducted through Google Search. The final phase of our Educanet analysis will be to attempt to establish a correlation between school interconnectivity within Educanet with their success rate in the ETH Swiss high school ranking. The intent of the publicly funded Educanet network is to enhance student performance, so a positive correlation between high activity and high performance would verify the success of the venture. We selected fifteen of Switzerlands top sixty-one Kantonsschules based on the number of students who are accepted into ETH as of 2007, which was the most recent publication that we were able to acquire. As an additional metric for analysis we also compared each schools performance with its interconnectivity on the open web. This would allow us to compare each schools ETH ranking with its betweenness centrality ranking from two separate virtual contexts. All queries for this phase were conducted through MSN Live Search.

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4.3 TakingITGlobal
TakingITGlobal.com is another web-based collaboration channel, however TIG is much less formal and is open to the public. TakingITGlobal is suitable particularly for our analyses, due to its size, the possibilities it offers and its target group. TIG is a fast and steadily growing Community (Figure 4.3-1) which state to serve primarily the youth between the ages of 13 to 30 through an online community and initiatives that focus on enabling actively engaged youth as well as educational programs geared towards middle and high school students.

Figure 4.3-1. TIG membership growth

TakingITGlobal describes its offering as: Global online social network and hub for civic participation; Content & tools for educators to facilitate rich, interactive learning experiences; Outreach & Collaboration tools for events, networks, campaigns, and causes; Research, development, and sharing of best practices on youth engagement; Facilitated learning experiences through workshops, webinars, and e-courses (TIG) While all publications of the TIG community are available to us we decided to focus our analysis specifically on the TIG Discussion board, and its eighteen sub forums (Figure 4.3-2), where a significant volume of member activity occurs.

Figure 4.3-2. TIG discussion board sub forums.

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Most communication occurs in seven languages, as illustrated by Figure 4.3-3. We decided to focus on the English speaking discussion board since an overwhelming majority of member activity occurs in this language.

Figure 4.3-3. TIG discussion board language composition

4.3.1 Data Collection & Database Design

A reasonable amount of TIGs member activity occurs within a discussion board comprised of a series of eighteen identically structured forums. We used the TIG discussion board as an experimental base to research the characteristics of TIGs innovative members and attempt to identify emerging trends. Each forum is composed of a concatenation of pages which display up to thirty threads each. Each thread can also contain several pages of user posts. A thread will always contain at least one post, which is the initial post of the thread originator. A post includes information about the originating author, the date and time when the post was created, a topic (which cannot vary from the original topic created by the thread originator and the respective comment of the creator), and finally the actual content of the post. Our database was designed and constructed to allow us to transform, visualize and analyze the social network structure and communication data of the TIG discussion board. Each post creates a communication connection, which is characterized by the posts sender, date and time, subject or topic, and content. A communication connection also includes the post receiver, however identifying the receiver is quite difficult since direct communication between members within a thread can occur in more than one way. One member can address another by mentioning their nickname, publishing a common reply without any information about the receiver, or using the special quote function to cite parts of previous posts including the nickname of the post author. The quote function also introduces parsing problems. Since multiple members can be quoted multiple times we cannot definitely say to which particular quote a member has replied. Furthermore the quote function is only rarely used, suggesting most members address each other by mentioning each others nicknames. When mentioning a receiver's nickname, spelling mistakes are common and nicknames may not only occur in direct communication but in references or signatures as well. Parsing the content for these types of posts and attributing them to the correct receiver is therefore mostly fault-prone. Posts without any information about receivers are also hard to categorize when displaying direct communication. For these reasons we decided that the receiver of each post is the thread originator and that the receiver of the first post of a thread is the forum in which the thread is published. Unfortunately with this method direct communication between users within a thread will not be detected and thereby only a communication connection via the thread originator will be displayed in the network.

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Considering the above described structures, we designed and programmed a parser which enabled us to collect and store 63,452 posts from 7,205 users. We also constructed a parser to collect and store relevant user profile data, which supported our research of the characteristics of innovative members. Our parser collected user data such as how many people are inspired by the user, groups and organizations the user belongs to, events and projects in the user participates, interests, friends, comments the user made, petitions the user has signed. Providing this information is optional, however, so the amount of published data for each user varies. We chose the Perl programming language for coding our parsers since Perl has many existing modules and can easily be used for editing and manipulating textiles, as well as identifying patterns with regular expressions. The TIG web portal is based on standard HTML which is a text based markup language. The web portal software generates a special text pattern containing layout information as well as start- and end- marks for sub forums, threads and posts. These patterns are easily identified and filtered with Perl. We used the Perl mechanize module to browse through the TIG Discussion Board pages and used regular expressions to find the patterns that mark the information which was relevant for us. We then extracted this relevant information from the web page and stored it in Condors email-Database format for later analysis. The Design of this Condor email database is specified through the before mentioned post characteristics, which define exactly each communication connection in the network. Each Communication connection characteristic is represented in the database design by a field in a Database table. Additionally these characteristics get dedicated to one of eighteen different datasets representing the eighteen sub forums with an additional field in this database table. Assigning each post to a data set has the advantage of dividing the data in eighteen data sets which can be later analyzed not only together as one but also each dataset separately.

4.3.2 Population and Sampling

To identify trends emerging within the TIG discussion board network we structured our analysis in two parts. Our first step is to find a COIN of innovative TIG members. Since innovators are generally of a higher socioeconomic status they are more exposed to mass media channels and are typically better-connected socially particularly to other innovators (Gloor, p.17). Therefore the most innovative members of TIG will be, in all probability, the creators or at least the promoters of the trends we are trying to discover. The second step in our analysis is then to examine the published post of these innovative members and extract the possible new trends. Our custom TIG parser stored 63,452 posts created by 7,205 users, representing the scope of the network we intend to analyze. We then ported this data into Condor to analyze and visualize social structure and actor importance within the network, allowing us to identify not only the most active regions of the TIG network, but the most active and centrally connected members of the network as well. Since these members are located in key positions within the flow of communication and are exceptionally active they are easily identified by their high betweenness centrality rank and highly active yet balanced contribution index. These members communicate evenly and often, are considerably more influential than others in the network, and are therefore most likely to be innovative members of a COIN. To confirm this assumption we also analyzed and visualized both the interconnectivity and activity of these members in their own displayed groups, events, projects, organizations, petitions, and public messages to friends and people who are inspired by them. After identifying the innovative users of the TIG Discussion board we analyzed the topics TIG users especially the innovators are interested in and participate in the most to discover possible new trends. We used the Condor term view tool to extract the most frequently used terms and phrases, and then to analyze the whole TIG Discussion Board network as well as two specific sub forums for Education and Technology. Next we identified and visualized the most innovative members interests, as published on their user profiles, which hinted at potential trends. We also analyzed posts written only by the innovators and replies to those posts within these specific data samples. This revealed the most frequently used words and the possible educational trends and developments emerging from these communication networks To verify that the trends we found in TIG are in fact reliable future trends we tried to show that it is possible to find these trend keywords from other resources also in the TIG term view network. We also tried to correlate our trends with those found in the Horizon Report, which tries to predict the usefulness of new technology and media in education. The Horizon Report is published by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium, which are comprised mostly of institutes, universities and colleges from the United States.

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5. Empirical Analysis 5.1 Educanet Results 5.1.1 Identifying Actors within Educanet
Our first challenge was to identify actors within Educanet. As mentioned before, public school content on the network includes a very specific url segment /.ws_gen/ and is always served from the .ch extension. Figure 5.1.1-1 shows a close-up of a communication view generated with the results of a 2-degree search for .ws_gen site:ch. Figure 5.1.1-2 shows the full map.

Figure 5.1.1-1. Close-up of a communication view for .ws_gen site:ch (Goel).

Figure 5.1.1-2 Complete communication view for .ws_gen site:ch(Goel).

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5.1.2 Segmenting Educanet by Language

Since Switzerland is a trilingual nation online communication appears in either German, French or Italian. We were able to isolate segments of Educanet based on language by conducting a series of queries, each including one of five most frequently used words from each language as a key. The following queries were executed to retrieve German pages, each containing one of five highly common words: der .ws_gen site:ch die .ws_gen site:ch und .ws_gen site:ch mit .ws_gen site:ch das .ws_gen site:ch Each query returned results from within the Educanet domain which included its common word somewhere in the content. Some second degree connections originated from within Educanet, but many were from the open web as well. The five resulting data sets were merged into one and rendered into the communication view shown in Figure 5.1.2-1. French pages were similarly collected with the query sets containing key words de, le, et, les, des (Figure 5.1.2-2) and Italian pages were collected with di, che, , il, per (Figure 5.1.2-3).

Figure 5.1.2-1. Communication view of German language data set.

Figure 5.1.2-2. Communication view of French language data set.

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Figure 5.1.2-3. Communication view of Italian language data set.

We then merged these three language sets into a single unified communication view (Figure 5.1.2-4) to demonstrate the true nature of a very diverse network connected to the outside world. There was considerable overlap of nodes suggesting participants in these language segments do not communicate exclusively among themselves. This also demonstrates how multiple language use is quite common in several sub domains of the network, as some sub domains such as fr.educanet2.ch and phzh.educanet2.ch appear in the Top Actors by Betweenness lists for all three languages. A high betweenness centrality index means these particular nodes are the most connected and central to all other nodes within the actor set. All queries for this phase were conducted through Google Search.

Figure 5.1.2-4. Communication view of all language data sets (Blue: German, Yellow: French, Orange: Italian).

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Node 1. 123people.ch 2. educanet2.ch 3. fr.educanet2.ch 4. echanges.ch 5. vd.educanet2.ch 6. pratic.ch 7. educ-envir.ch

Betweenness Centrality 0.23827298 0.20343745 0.15252984 0.090484925 0.0872812 0.086517 0.086098626 0.07293388 0.06150673 0.057567257

Node 11. phzh.educanet2.ch 12. educa.ch 13. kmslu.educanet2.ch 14. sevelin44.educanet2.ch 15. fri-tic.educanet2.ch 16. bezaarau.educanet2.ch 17. coglane.educanet2.ch 18. ecmy.educanet2.ch 19. bsb.educanet2.ch 20. monanimal.educanet2.ch

Betweenness Centrality 0.056397624 0.049372926 0.027641712 0.026813043 0.02577879 0.025294416 0.02430306 0.023584196 0.02325969 0.022646038

8. co-gruyere.ch 9. fri-tic.ch
10. co-belluard.ch

Table 5.1.2-1 shows the top twenty nodes of this collection by betweenness centrality

Figure 5.1.2-5. Top 25 nodes by betweenness centrality (Blue: German, Yellow: French, Orange: Italian).

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5.1.3 Correlating Interconnectivity with Performance

The final phase of our Educanet analysis was to attempt to correlate school interconnectivity within Educanet with their success rate in the ETH Swiss high school ranking. As mentioned before, we selected fifteen of Switzerlands top sixty-one Kantonsschules based on the number of students who are accepted into ETH as of 2007, which was the most recent publication that we were able to acquire. As an additional metric for analysis we also compared each schools performance with its interconnectivity on the open web. This would allow us to compare each schools ETH ranking with its betweenness centrality ranking from two separate virtual contexts. When searching within the scope of the Educanet network, queries were constructed by combining each schools name with .ws_gen site:ch, such as rychenberg .ws_gen site:ch. To search the open web, however, we had to test a number of query structures to ensure we were receiving relevant, useful results. We soon discovered it was sufficient to simply query kantonsschule rychenburg and used similar queries for the rest of our selected schools, substituting kantonsschule for gymnasium, realgymnasium, or liceo as in the case of Italian Lugano as necessary. Since these terms are fairly specific to the exact entities we wish to locate, no further query syntax or key words are necessary. All queries for this phase are shown in Table 5.1.3-1. Schools by ETH Rank Educanet Query Open Web Query

1. 3. 6. 9.

Rychenberg

rychenberg .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule rychenberg

Hohe Promenade

hohe promenade .ws_gen site:ch

hohe promenade

Limmattal

limmattal .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule limmattal

Frauenfeld

frauenfeld .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule frauenfeld

14. Glattal, Dubendorf 20. Wettingen 24. Rmibhl 30. Overwil 33. Buelrain, Winterthur 35. Hottingen 42. Kirschgarten Basel

glattal .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule glattal

wettingen .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule wettingen

rmibhl .ws_gen site:ch

realgymnasium rmibhl

oberwil .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule oberwil

belrain .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule belrain

hottingen .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule hottingen

kirschgarten basel .ws_gen site:ch

gymnasium kirschgarten basel

19

Schools by ETH Rank

Educanet Query

Open Web Query

51. Solothurn 52. Kollegium Schwyz 54. Lugano 56. KME fur Erwachsene

solothurn .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule solothurn

kollegium schwyz .ws_gen site:ch

kantonsschule kollegium schwyz

lugano .ws_gen site:ch

lugano liceo

kme .ws_gen site:ch

kme fur erwachsene

Table 5.1.3-1. Selected schools and their respective Educanet and open web queries (source ETH school ranking list)

Figures 5.1.3-1 and 5.1.3-2 show the communication views resulting from the 1-degree and 2-degree analyses of the Educanet-batch of queries. Compared to previous analyses of specific schools by name, these initial results demonstrate surprisingly low interconnectivity. The 1-degree analysis (Figure 5.1.3-1) shows that Solothurn, Overwil and Lugano appear to have the most network activity, however they appear nowhere near the top of the ETH list. The 2-degree analysis (Figure 5.1.3-2), which is colored by betweenness centrality, shows that Frauenfeld, Solothurn and Overwil are the most central of our fifteen selected schools within Educanet. The overall betweenness centrality ranking is recorded in Table 5.1.3-2

Figure 5.1.3-1. 1-Degree analysis of selected schools in Educanet.

20

Figure 5.1.3-2. 2-Degree analysis of selected schools in Educanet.

Figures 5.1.3-3 and 5.1.3-4 show the communication views resulting from the 1-degree and 2-degree analyses of the open web queries. As Figure 5.1.3-3 shows, it is immediately apparent that the schools are slightly more interconnected on the open web than within the Educanet network, but overall activity is still relatively weak. The 2-degree analysis (Figure 5.1.3-4) shows a much stronger galaxy configuration clustering around popular web portals like Wikipedia, YouTube, and analytic site Alexa.com. The betweenness centrality ranking of our schools on the open web is, once again, sporadically inconsistent with their rank on the ETH list, as recorded in Table 5.1.3-2.

Figure 5.1.3-3. 1-Degree analysis of selected schools on the open web.

21

Figure 5.1.3-4. 2-Degree analysis of selected schools on the open web.

Schools by ETH Rank

Educanet BC

Open Web BC

1. 3. 6. 9.

Rychenberg

0.006849315

0.03769745

Hohe Promenade

Limmattal

0.028970378

Frauenfeld

0.1728617

0.024972059

14. Glattal, Dubendorf 20. Wettingen 24. Rmibhl 30. Overwil 33. Buelrain, Winterthur 35. Hottingen

0.030440934

0.024692517

0.029839098

0.031365536

0.1471472

0.035575304

0.028906949

0.053731915

22

Schools by ETH Rank

Educanet BC

Open Web BC

42. Kirschgarten Basel 51. Solothurn 52. Kollegium Schwyz 54. Lugano 56. KME fur Erwachsene

0.10413187

0.16325957

0.09717973

0.11925696

0.03270225

0.04383252

Table 5.1.3-2. Selected schools and their respective betweenness centrality in Educanet and on the open web.

Figure 5.1.3-5 illustrates a complete lack of correlation between school interconnectivity, either on Educanet or the open web, and success on the ETH Swiss high school ranking. The schools with the highest betweenness centrality were inconsistently scattered throughout the ETH list. With the exception of those four schools (Frauenfeld, Overwil, Solothurn, Lugano) most schools were comparatively better-connected on the open web than on Educanet.

Figure 5.1.3-5. Betweenness centrality of 2-degree analysis of selected schools on Educanet (Blue) and on the open web (Green), listed by ETH ranking.

23

5.2 TakingITGlobal Results 5.2.1 Identifying TIG Communication Network

To identify trends emerging within the TIG discussion board network we must first find a COIN of innovative TIG members who will most likely be responsible for creating, promoting or inspiring those very trends. To identify a COIN, however, we must first analyze the densely networked structure and filter nodes out until the densely interconnected core remains. Figure 5.2.1-1 shows a static communication view of the highly active TIG discussion board which we used for our experimental network base.

Figure 5.2.1-1. Static communication view of the TIG discussion board.

The high volume of nodes and dense interconnectivity that distinguishes this network make it impossible to visually identify the COIN on a standard display monitor. By filtering the actor set down by degree centrality we are able to observe the top 350 nodes, which could then be filtered by betweenness centrality to try to identify the most central members who make the most contributions to the community.

5.2.2 Identifying Top Betweeners

To find the top betweeners of the network we used Condor to calculate and visualize the network members with the highest betweenness centrality (Figure 5.2.2-1 and Table 5.2.2-1).

Figure 5.2.2-1. Betweenness centrality of the most interconnected members of TIG discussion board.

24

Member

Betweenness Centrality 0.12958632 0.090344794 0.08550182 0.046079863 0.045178626 0.037290398 0.036694843

Member

Betweenness Centrality 0.036694843 0.031474203 0.03047927 0.02926587 0.029845247 0.025980579 0.0274526

1. luke 2. anuriandima84 3. mnopq 4. hugh 5. katulus 6. udara2004 7. jennysmith

8. plato123 9. taikod 10. prieten47 11. mfurdyk 12. ayamanelhakea 13. kirstenjordan 14. angel_on_broomstick

Table 5.2.2-1. Top betweeners of TIG discussion board.

Since our goal is to discover educational trends we tried to identify a COIN not only within the whole TIG discussion board but also within education and technology sub forums, as they are specifically related to educational issues and technology developments. It is also possible that a unique COIN exists in one or both of these individual sub forums since members from the primary COIN may be more or less active in one or the other. Figure 5.2.2-2 shows the most central members of the education sub forum, filtered first by degree centrality and then by betweenness centrality. Figure 5.2.2-3 shows the same for the technology sub forum.

Figure 5.2.2-2. Most central members of the education sub forum.

25

Member 1. anuriandima84 2. jennysmith 3. taikod 4. freechild 5. mnopq

Betweenness Centrality 0.25970858 0.20186552 0.17120667 0.13345215 0.102592975

Member

Betweenness Centrality 0.08609069 0.08181887 0.08224667 0.08211377 0.074352376

6. plato123 7. opinionram14
8. 9. drbadr batoola

10. nelson67

Table 5.2.2-2. Top betweeners of education sub forum.

Figure 5.2.2-3. Most central members of the technology sub forum.

Member 1. mnopq 2. mfurdyk 3. taikod 4. kiwicommons1 5. bono_fan 6. akzaman

Betweenness Centrality 0.29102632 0.18513991 0.1623597 0.07508126 0.08094001 0.08089211

Member 11. seanamo 12. plato123 13. payab 14. prieten47 15. jcottes 16. globalur

Betweenness Centrality 0.05839673 0.053228986 0.05178536 0.049351886 0.04669348 0.042501565

26

Member 7. laurent

Betweenness Centrality 0.07266891 0.055898286 0.064986184 0.060755268

Member 17. rsmarg 18. shakti 19. luke

Betweenness Centrality 0.0416889 0.040508833 0.03542867

8. yourfindit 9. wvanbokk
10. angel_on_broomstick

Table 5.2.2-3. Top betweeners of technology sub forum.

5.2.3 Identifying Top Contributors

We analyzed the contribution indices of members in the TIG discussion board and selected sub forums to test our assumption that the top betweeners we identified as being the most central to these networks are also the most innovative as well.

Figure 5.2.3-1. Contribution index of the most active members of TIG discussion board

We suspect that highly active members of the TIG discussion board recognize trends earlier than other members and frequently participate in topics they find interesting or promising. Figure 5.2.3-1 shows a contribution index graph of the most active members with top betweeners colored red for easy identification. Figures 5.2.3-2 and 5.2.3-3 show contribution index graphs of the most active members in the education and technology sub forums.

27

Figure 5.2.3-2. Contribution index of the most active members of education sub forum.

Figure 5.2.3-3. Contribution index of the most active members of technology sub forum.

28

5.2.4 Identifying Characteristics of Innovators

As we mentioned before, innovators are generally more socially engaged with other innovators are better connected socially and particularly well connected to other innovators. They participate in more social activities and are more cosmopolitan than later adopters (Gloor, p.17). We can test these conditions against our collection of most central, active TIG members by analyzing the social interconnectivity of our users public profile data. Since innovators socialize with other innovators, a majority of our collection of members should be friends with each other. Figure 5.2.4-1 visualizes the static communication view of friendship relations that occur among our most active, central members. The displayed friend network demonstrates that the mentioned characteristics of a high social connectivity with other innovators can be also found among our predicted innovators. Although the specification of user information in the user profile is not obligatory almost all innovative members can be found in the displayed friend network.

Figure 5.2.4-1. Static communication view of friendship relations among most active, central members.

We compared the number of attributes that our selected members share to those of average TIG members to determine if our predicted innovators also represent the aforementioned characteristic of participating in more social activities. Figure 5.2.4-2 shows a series of graphs comparing our innovators (red) with average members (blue).

29

Figure 5.2.4-2. Graphs comparing number of activities, friends, interests, contributions and betweenness of our innovators (red) with average TIG members (blue).

These graphs confirm that the members we identified from the TIG discussion board membership as innovative sufficiently fulfill the characteristics of innovators. They are involved in more social activities than average members, are more socially connected with other members and with each other, and participate together in driving the conversation of a very active communication network. Based on these observations we can assume that members are really the innovative members of the COIN.

5.2.5 Identifying Trends in Terminology on TakingITGlobal

In order to find out what people are talking about in TIG, we used the condor tool Term View to analyze the whole TIG discussion board as well as the sub forums education and technology. We wanted to have a general view on the discussion board to know what are the most important topics, so that we could compare this results with the topics of the most relevant sub forums. The most important sub forums, for our purpose, were the education and the technology sub forums, where we supposed the discussion of new educational trends would be oriented in a technological way. We selected the top 20 interesting, relevant single words and the top 10 of the combined words. Different from the analysis regarding the most innovative users in TIG, we claim that for the analysis of trends the frequency of used terms is more important than the betweenness centrality. The important idea here is that an actor is central if it lies between other actors on their geodesics, implying that to have a large betweenness centrality, the actor must be between many of the actors via their geodesics. (Wasserman, Faust , p.189) The nodes in the term view networks are the terms themselves. A high betweenness centrality states that a word is often used in association with other terms or is used with terms which are used very often themselves. We consider a term very important if it is used often, even if it is not often used in context with other relevant terms. Tables 5.2.5-1, 5.2.5-2 and 5.2.5-3 show the results of this term view analysis for the TIG discussion board, education sub forum and technology sub forum. The five most between terms are highlighted for each, and terms without a betweenness value had no relation to any other terms.

30

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Term peopl american think world childern women muslim iraq islam israel men right arab human africa tig believ palestinian war christian women men muslim christian muslim countri palestinian isra iraq war islam religion iraq iran women right children women

Betweenness Centrality 0.10820843 0.010617015 0.048930943 0.028816 0.02757732 0.024739152 0.06231061 0.07178224 0.04162095 0.037076313 0.008060904 0.028816 0.001844584 0.01847117 0.0 0.0 0.028816 0.03032115 0.010617015 0.016284082 0.0 0.0 0.0010014618 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

0.0 30 muslim islam Table 5.2.5-1. Results of the term view analysis for TIG discussion board. Top 5 terms are highlighted, terms without betweenness values had no relation to any other terms in the network.

31

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Term school educ student children learn allah globalization world english arab better time life univers knowledge prophet islam class interest idea develop countri human right arab quraan educ system web site learn english allah taught mobile phone school student

Betweenness Centrality 0.012717941 0.012717941 0.007688636 0.0064249 0.12134674 0.014345543 0.0032197717 0.04432112 0.0115506705 0.0056398045 0.027130635 0.06801342 0.023053057

0.015635476 0.008717949 0.0040891333 2.05E-04 0.0050726966 0.010216774 0 0 0 0.0050726966

0 0

0.0051276414

0 30 educ children Table 5.2.5-2. Results of the term view analysis for education sub forum. Top 5 terms are highlighted, terms without betweenness values had no relation to any other terms in the network.

32

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Term internet ict technolog onlin peopl web world websit africa inform email develop commun tig digit comput youth global children googl internet access internet user web site ict develop onlin commun develop countri google yahoo human right internet made ict digit

Betweenness Centrality 0.086482264 0.027525067 0.042424247 0.010543836 0.116498314 0.007459421 0.03259179 0.0022403742 0 0.042424247 4.61E-04 0.02616385 0.034868814 0 0.020059625 0.010588501 0.034455873 0.009573722 0 0.071428575 0 0 0 1.76E-04 0 0.005383388 0 6.61E-04

Table 5.2.5-3. Results of the term view analysis for technology sub forum. Top 5 terms are highlighted, terms without

betweenness values had no relation to any other terms in the network.

33

The topics that are covered in TIG are very up-to-date. Political issues like human rights, women's rights, conflicts in the Near East as well as religious topics like the islam make up a large part of the most discussed topics in TIG. This is also mirrored in the names of the different sub forums like Peace and Conflict, Human Rights, Culture, etc. In the education forum a lot of terms related to school and learning show up, which is no big surprise, but also terms like globalization, allah and mobile phone appear in this context. Figure 5.2.5-1 demonstrates a visualization of the most relevant and frequently used terms in the TIG discussion board. The terms mobile phones, the islam and globalization are particularly significant because they do not match the ordinary vocabulary used for educational issues.

Figure 5.2.5-1. Visualization of most relevant terms in TIG discussion board.

5.2.6 Comparing Trends with the Horizon Report

We wanted to find out if educational trends predicted by other resources could be identified within TIG. The source of our choice was the Horizon Report. This document outlines six emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use in learning-focused organizations within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years (Horizon Report 2009, p3). The first time slot is within one year and the predicted innovations are mobile phones and cloud computing. The second one is within two to three years and includes geo-everything: Geocoded data has many applications, but until very recently, it was timeconsuming and difficult for non-specialists to determine the physical coordinates of a place or object, and options for using that data were limited. Now, many common devices can automatically determine and record their own precise location and can save that data along with captured media (like photographs) or can transmit it to web-based applications for a host of uses. The full implications of geo-tagging are still unfolding, but the impact in research has already been profound. (Horizon Report 2009, p4) as well as the personal web: Springing from the desire to reorganize online content rather than simply viewing it, the personal web is part of a trend that has been fueled by tools to aggregate the flow of content in customizable ways and expanded by an increasing collection of widgets that manage online content. The term personal web was coined to represent a collection of technologies that are used to configure and manage the ways in which one views and uses the Internet. Using a growing set

34

of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create a customized, personal web-based environment a personal web that explicitly supports ones social, professional, learning, and other activities. (Horizon Report 2009, p4) The last one is within four to five years and predicted semantic-aware applications: New applications are emerging that are bringing the promise of the semantic web into practice without the need to add additional layers of tags, identifiers, or other top-down methods of defining context. Tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract embedded meaning are providing rich new ways of finding and aggregating content. At the same time, other tools are allowing context to be easily modified, shaped, and redefined as information flows are combined. (Horizon Report 2009, p4) and smart objects: Sometimes described as the Internet of things, smart objects describe a set of technologies that is imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information. A smart object knows something about itself where and how it was made, what it is for, where it should be, or who owns it, for example and something about its environment. While the underlying technologies that make this possible RFID, QR codes, smartcards, touch and motion sensors, and the like are not new, we are now seeing new forms of sensors, identifiers, and applications with a much more generalizable set of functionalities. (Horizon Report 2009, p4) We created what is called startwordlist out of terms that are mentioned in this resource related to the predicted trends, which we then used to generate new term views. Condor only chooses those terms of the startwordlist, that can be found in the analyzed content. Once again, we picked 20 most relevant single words and 10 most relevant combined words to find out if the predicted trends of the horizon report show up in our networks and, if they do appear, how they are embedded. Tables 5.2.6-1, 5.2.6-2 and 5.2.6-3 list the results of the term view combining our TIG predicted trends combined with the Horizon Report terms. The five most between terms are highlighted for each, and terms without a betweenness value had no relation to any other terms.

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Term peopl american think world childern women muslim countri iraq islam israel

Betweenness Centrality 0.0993635 0.004081776 0.08921438 0.0691866 0.025665857 0.02219166 0.0044972827 0.039891288 0.009080672 0.0038051857 0.0021108398

35

Rank 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Term globalization men live right arab human africa tig believ help mobile hosting apple women men tagging muslim christian commodity muslim countri mobile phone palestinian isra iraq war islam religion iraq iran women right children women muslim islam cloud iPhone iPhone 3G apple iPhone delicious.com RSS

Betweenness Centrality 0.027903685 0.01861071 0.017419 0.020589475 0.0050870297 0.017521141 0.011503604 0.014717766 0.01915313 0.055908028 0.0085614715 0.0011722479 0.013375553 1.51E-04 0.0011981891 8.25E-04 3.97E-05 8.07E-04 0.0039007962 3.67E-05 3.53E-04 5.73E-05 0.0010241346 4.70E-04 1.52E-04 5.66E-05 0.003308214 0.002479552 9.47E-04 0.0014590985 0 7.36E-05

36

Rank 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Term GPS Google Maps wifi collaborative work RFID collecting intelligence android could computing twine precise location technological literacy voice-over-IP internet of things third-party applications visualization tools microblogging personal web new interfaces social operating systems information literacy Snap-Tell smart objects slideshare Shazam web-browsing

Betweenness Centrality 0.006553712 7.09E-05 0.0015103485 0 2.36E-05 0 1.80E-04 0 0 0 1.98E-04 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Table 5.2.6-1. Results of the TIG discussion board/Horizon Report composite term view analysis. Top 5 terms are highlighted, terms without betweenness values had no relation to any other terms in the network. Rank 1 2 3 4 Term school educ student children Betweenness Centrality 0.028462945 0.0508069 0.021579428 0.015784064

37

Rank 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Term learn teacher allah globalization world help taught arab time life univers teach work studi knowledg prophet islam mobile hosting arab quraan educ system learn english allahmade allah taught mobile phone tagging apple commodity school student educ children learn arab cloud

Betweenness Centrality 0.041168083 0.015580831 0.0051502646 0.016064165 0.031438157 0.057653755 0.009797616 0.006382463 0.07085198 0.030913802 0 0.01052685 0.10476661 0.01606463 0.009853883 0.0028221079 0.008019526 3.30E-04 5.65E-04 6.21E-04 0.0052901623 8.89E-05 5.44E-05 5.78E-05 0 0 0.008479802 4.02E-05 0.0022961718 0 4.17E-04 9.54E-05

38

Rank 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Term student learn student teacher delicious.com RSS apple iPhone iPhone iPhone 3G social operating systems information literacy technological literacy Snap-Tell Google Maps GPS

Betweenness Centrality 0.0027697985 5.99E-04 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0

Table 5.2.6-2. Results of the education sub forum/Horizon Report composite term view analysis. Top 5 terms are highlighted, terms without betweenness values had no relation to any other terms in the network.

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Term internet org technolog onlin globalization web world websit africa inform email mobile develop commun tig digit

Betweenness Centrality 0.08339646 0.06390927

0.026920263 0.03366019 0.059037477

0.0183122 2.20E-04 0.0899166

0.014099746

0.012214708 0

39

Rank 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Term comput youth global project interest googl mobile phone hosting apple iPhone tagging apple iPhone iPhone 3G internet access internet user web site GPS commodity onlin commun develop countri googl yahoo wifi human right RFID internet made email info project takingitglob cloud cloud computing RSS Google Maps voice-over-IP

Betweenness Centrality

0.035088755 0.026920263 0.038121726 0.008055788

2.20E-04

0 0 6.76E-04

0 0 0 0 0

40

Rank 49 50

Term third-party applications android

Betweenness Centrality

Table 5.2.6-3. Results of the technology sub forum/Horizon Report composite term view analysis. Top 5 terms are highlighted, terms without betweenness values had no relation to any other terms in the network.

We identified several terms from our startwordlist in all three networks. We must distinguish if any terms are exclusive to either of the sub forums, or if any words in the whole forum are not in either of the two sub forums. Figures 5.2.6-1 and 5.2.6-2 show term views for the sub forums.

Figure 5.2.6-1. Visualization of most relevant terms in TIG discussion board . sub forum education

Figure 5.2.6-1. Visualization of most relevant terms in TIG discussion board sub forum technology.

In both networks, mobile phones and especially iPhone show up. This seems to match with the proposition of the Horizon Report, which grades mobile phones as a cutting-edge topic. In the education forum we found Snap-

41

Tell, which is a mobile application that tags photos automatically. In the technology forum we found android, which is a mobile operating system, used among others for the google mobile phone nexus one. Cloud computing shows up in the technological sub forum. GPS was found in both networks. This term is important in relation to mobile phones as well as to geo-everything. Google Maps appeared in the education forum. This term can also be related to geo-everything. The term personal web is not found in the two sub-networks but in the whole one. Related terms are tagging (found in both), RSS (found in education) and the social bookmarking page delicious.com (found in education). Microblogging (e.g. via twitter) is also mentioned in the context with personal web, because people use it to tell their friends what they are doing right now and read this messages to stay informed. In the education forum two other interesting terms were found. The first one is technological literacy, which is: the ability to understand and evaluate technology. It complements technological competency, which is the ability to create, repair, or operate specific technologies, commonly computers (technological literacy), The second one is information literacy, that deals with information research mainly on the internet, including the questions where to find the information and how to evaluate it in a special context (information literacy.). RFID shows up in the technology forum. The possibility to identify objects with RFID-tags is a crucial point concerning the idea of smart objects. Another term that is related to smart objects is the phrase internet-ofthings. (internet-of-things). Other terms that could not be found in the two sub forums, but where detected in the whole forum are slideshare, Shazam and twine. Slideshare (slideshare,shazam,twine) is a online service where slides can be shared with others. Shazam(shazam) is a mobile application that identifies songs and twine(twine) is a semantic web tool, helping to organize, share and discover information. Based on our term view analysis of TIG discussion board content as compared to the Horizon Report, we have established that 14,9% of the startwordlist-terms could be found in the education forum 15,7% of the terms were discovered in the technology forum The whole discussion board covered 29,9% of the list

5.2.7 Topics Related to the Most Innovative Members

To analyze the topics discussed by the most innovative users we built a separate database only including the posts written by the innovators themselves or appearing in a thread that was somehow related to an innovator (e.g. created by an innovator). Because a lot of the terms didn't appear in the network (they had no relations to the other terms) we choose more terms then in previous term processes, as listed in Table 5.2.7-1 and visualized in Figure 5.2.7-1. Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Term israel government iraq america iran political org military 0.1064835 Betweenness Centrality 0.04056379 3.62E-04 0.0049283695 0.020064678 0.017222097

42

Rank 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Term muslim palestinian course international religious weapons islam community security war society hamas terrorism policy future europe information groups html education india members afghanistan jewish china people killed globalization

Betweenness Centrality 0.022311436 0.012985838 0 0

0.0056998627 0.005286145

0.03362464

6.45E-04

0 0.019478986 0.007651599

0.04213411 0.0017456735 0.007829516 0.005716924 0.0104474975

0.016266832

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Rank 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Term iraq iran women rights appication collaboration mobile iran president platform american history hosting commodity american president apple developers mobile phone RSS cloud broadband delicious.com tagging wifi GPS operating systems iPhone precise location

Betweenness Centrality 1.74E-04 0

0.0056404388

0.004838299

0.021357045

0 0 8.91E-05

0 0 0

Table 5.2.7-1. Terms related to most innovative members. Top 5 terms are highlighted, terms without betweenness values had no relation to any other terms in the network.

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Figure 5.2.7-1. Visualization of most frequent terms in innovator discourse. Our results do not differ very much from our first term view analysis, however the topic war and the related terms appear more often and terrorism comes more to the fore, as human rights and women's rights take a backseat. Terms like mobile phone, iPhone, broadband and GPS appear once again and verify the overall impact of mobile phones today. Terms like tagging, delicious.com and RSS also support the influence of the personal web topic in everyday life. We also calculated the volume of innovator participation in posts related to the terms from the horizon-report startwordlist and discovered that 20% of the innovators were involved in the threads covering the horizon report terms.

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7. Discussion
Our analyses of Educanet and TakingITGlobal have yielded some very interesting insights. We began this project expecting to find intense collaboration occurring within the education network of innovative Switzerland. We really didnt know what to expect from TakingITGlobal, but could tell from the sheer volume of posts displayed before each discussion board sub forum that something interesting was happening. Each provided its own surprises, and together they paint an intriguing picture of how young people collaborate (or do not collaborate) in virtual learning environments. Educanet, as described before, is a web-based educational network commissioned by the Swiss government; a planned institutional system intended to foster greater collaboration and enhance the learning experience of students all across Switzerland. It provides a simple framework that allows students, faculty and institutions in general to create, publish and share information on the open web. Tools like these are incredibly common these days. So common, in fact, that we sometimes take for granted why they have emerged in the first place. Briefly suspend the notion of institutional education as we have known it for the last hundred or so years. We discussed previously how learning is a process of social participation by people engaged in a shared pursuit like ice hockey, highway construction, or school over time. Communication is simply a means of coordinating behavior to that end, which is driven by the exchange of meaning (Capra, p.53). Identities are forged, connecting those engaged together in the perpetual renegotiation of meaning and the many reifications created when that meaning is projected onto the world in the form of concepts, articles, blueprints, policies, or various types of technology such as chalkboards or sophisticated communication networks (Wenger, p. 59, 149). Experience within one of these mutually engaged groups establishes competence, which creates opportunities for experience, which in turn fosters greater competence (Wenger, p.138). This is learning in the most abstract and fundamental sense, but it is quite easy to see how it relates to our project. We learn by doing and becoming a member of the community that is actively engaged in the activity or trade we wish to join. If a classroom becomes too isolated from the practice it professes to teach, then the lesson becomes more about how to be a student of this class than how to be a member of that profession (Wenger, 267). Reification must follow as a result of participation. When it precedes participation, as is the case when a tool is imposed on a community as a solution to an implied shortcoming, it either fails completely or is reinvented, reinterpreted or in some other way renegotiated into the context of that community. When reification naturally emerges from participation it is sincerely rooted in necessity, as if it were a piece of the structure supporting the communitys own socially constructed reality. During our analyses we noticed that the volume of search results Condor collected for the Educanet network was significantly lower than parallel queries on the open web. It seems that the network is rarely used by either students or faculty for anything of significant importance. Given Switzerlands incredible social, cultural and religious diversity and the many uniquely original contexts of meaning that result one has to wonder how widely adopted a centrally designed and distributed collaboration framework could possibly be. One interesting parallel between Educanet and TakingITGlobal is the nature of its user base. TakingITGlobal is an open online community of young people from all corners of the globe. It doesnt get more culturally diverse than that. As we mentioned before, these two networks are diametrical opposites in terms of their origins and intentions: Educanet is a planned institutional system, and TIG is a public, open community where young people freely self-assemble and communicate around the topics and issues that they find interesting. The magnitude of TIG membership activity suggests that this open model could offer great potential for formalized educational institutions, but that is just one of many possibilities for future study. TakingITGlobal is a great place for young people to discuss cutting-edge topics with users from all over the world, and so the conversations happening on TIG are very up-to-the-minute. Young people are talking about topics like human rights, the war, the Middle East conflict and so on. The clustering of specific Islamic terminology, illustrated in Figure 7-1, tell an interesting story. Most of the TIG activity originates from the United States, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand (Figure 7-2), but countries like Sri Lanka, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria are also quite active. As we learned before, Arabic accounts for only 4.26% of communication, while English is the predominant language at a full 90% (Figure 5.3-3). This leads one to reasonably suspect that the majority of conversation involving clusters of islamic terminology is originating from Western (or otherwise westernized) nations. What we may very well be witnessing is a community of young people binding together to communicate and share meaning as they negotiate the uncertainties and questions of identity that emerge when cultures collide.

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What is even more interesting, and in fact quite inspiring, is how this cluster joins the rest of the conversation through the core terms of hope, help, learning, love and knowledge.

Figure 7-1. Term view from TIG discussion board.

Figure 7-2. Predominant nationalities of the TIG member base.

TakingITGlobals young member base demonstrates another point worth discussing. When generations become isolated from each other they no longer benefit from their shared history. The young are not given a chance to invest their fresh energy in pushing histories of practice forward, nor is their unbridled naivete subjected to the accountability inherent in engagement in actual practice (Wenger, 275). While it is certainly necessary for young people to have their own contexts for communication and expression which TIG exemplifies it is important to recognize that our hyper-connected world makes it easier than ever for generations to become detrimentally isolated from practice. It is also worth mentioning that in this hyper-connected world it is easier than ever to achieve the profound yet often overlooked educational benefits of effectively facilitated and meaningful interaction between students and those engaged in the practices they will one day join.

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8. Conclusion
In this paper we analyzed emerging patterns of behavior and trends within the collaborative innovation networks Educanet2.ch and TakingITGlobal.com, and discovered key characteristics of the innovative trendsetters at the core of these networks. We were able to identify and isolate the Educanet network on the open web, and were even successful in segmenting the network by language. We tried to establish a correlation between school interconnectivity, both within Educanet and on the open web, with success in the ETH Swiss high school ranking, however we concluded that no such correlation exists. In our analysis of TakingITGlobal we identified users with high betweenness centrality and contribution indices, as well as a number of other important characteristics. These users had significantly more friends, made more posts, joined more groups, signed more petitions and were generally more socially engaged than other members, leading us to the believe that these users are also innovators. Since innovators are commonly trendsetters, we expected these members would talk about topics that were identified as trends by other resources. We compared term frequency from the Horizon Report to term frequency by our innovative users. Some of the trending topics were mentioned, however too infrequently to establish a reliable correlation. To be fair, one external resource does not allow for a comprehensive analysis. Additional resources certainly do exist, but time constraints made further analysis unfeasible within the scope of this project. We also defined and explained the core concepts of social network analysis and learning as a social practice, to which we later returned to help explain some of the patterns of behavior that we were witnessing. These insights have opened new possibilities for future research that we find quite interesting. Onsite ethnographic research will be a critical next step for further identifying and addressing both the limitations and opportunities of Educanet. The ability to correlate offline behavior with online structure could help to establish a holistic, systemic model for collaboration in the education system. Another particularly interesting possibility is to identify and replicate cases of positive deviance rare, successful practice obscured by the complexity and scope of the problem by developing a program aimed at propagating those favorable behaviors throughout the system.

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8.References
Capra, Fritjof. January 2002. The Hidden Connections. New York: First Anchor Books Edition. Gloor, Peter A., and Scott M. Cooper. 2007 Print. Coolhunting Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. New York: AMACOM/American Management Association. Goel, Kanupriya, Graphs provided by Kanupriya Goel, Savannah College of Art & Design, 7.2.2010 Sawyer, Keith. 2008 Print. Group Genius The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Basic. Wasserman, Faust. 1999 Reprinted. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge University Press Wenger, Etienne. 1999 Print. Communities of Practice Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge UP

Online sources (last access 07/02/2010) Condor Manual 2.2 http://wiki.soberit.hut.fi/virtualbrownbag/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=9 ETH school ranking list http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/zuerich/kanton/ETHRangliste-zeigt-welche-Gymnasien-besser-sind-alsandere/story/16491807 (primary source ETH ) Horizon Report 2009: a collaboration between The NEW MEDIA CONSORTIUM and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5612.pdf internet - of -things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things information literacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_literacy shazam http://www.shazam.com/ slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ technological literacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_literacy TIG http://www.tigweb.org/about/ twine http://www.twine.com/