iLearner on CCK08

The good: I managed to attend the session on Elluminate today. The bad: A flue forced me to stay away from ITU-course in Copenhagen.

I have heard the name Valdis Krebs in connection to network. But I have never read or seen anything that he made. A couple of weeks ago I tryed to learn to use program for analysing  network, especially Social Network. Pajek and UCINET  were the tools we used. It very interesting, and difficult, but I’m still turned on. It’s very fascinating to draw the diagrams and discover some sort of meaning out of very simple data.

I think the point that Valdis Krebs presented near the end of his talk: the drawings are very good as an introduction to conversations about networks. What can we understand about our business, costumers, schoolclass by viewing the network maps? It’s not “the truth” about a network!

George Siemens asked Valdis about a special picture that he thought might be a picture of cck08-course-network. The one with a dense center with many paticipants and connections, 60% of participant very spread.  And he was a little concerned about the value of this kind of network.

And that’s a central subject of SNA, to evaluate the value of networks, connections. And how do you do hat properly? I think that its important to ad more information about the network, than what the networkdiagram tells.

How do we evaluate the value of a network?

Is it a problem that many participants only have  loose connections? I am working on getting ‘more connected’, and its an ongoing proces, but more difficult than expected.

/j