S'il te plait, find me a name!

A vision of students today

Michael L. Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University known for a pretty good (not to mention educational) video about "web 2.0", had the best students' project idea for his Spring 07 anthropology class: students surveyed themselves to give us "a vision of students today". Fascinating!

This is not a social graph

The debate that agitated the tech blogsphere yesterday was fascinating. You will find its traces on techmeme.

For some reason, the discussion reminds me of Magritte's piece "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe) that tells us about the treachery of images.

Basically, the ever-blunt Dave Winer wrote a blog where he considered that bloggers should avoid "sounding like a monkey" and realize that what they usually consider a "social graph" is just a graph, and not an actual "social graph" (see figure to the left).

Therefore, according to Winer, we should stop calling social graphs social graphs (if you follow me / him) but, rather, social networks. To Winer, the denomination of social network has the advantage of avoiding all confusion.

That so many tech bloggers picked on the post and that it became the number one item on tech.meme is quite surprising to me. Part of all the excitement came from the fact that it was a slow week-end, even for the Silicon Valley. Yet, the discussion showed one blogger, Winer, asserting his authority based on his knowledge and expertise, and other bloggers defining themselves with regard to this knowledge. Some bloggers, such as Alec Saunders, opposed Winer's view, and there opposition was quite theoretical, having to do with the role of the internet in general (and bloggers in particular) for the public: should it be to echo celebrity gossip or to educate others?

Whatever one's position on the debate (and we may find its substance razor-thin), in the end, a social graph is not a social graph: it is a concept and a foundation for identity.

Youngsters network, too

I have not posted much in the last few weeks -- Blame it on the always brutal beginning of the Academic year.

So here is a small and pointless post, to piggyback on this previous post that discussed social networking applications for (slightly) older persons.

So, in fairness to our young (very young) friends, it is time to acknowledge their own networks.

Here it is, tested for you: Club Penguin is a must among the young and innovative crowd. One will appreciate both the computer literacy needed to navigate the website as well as the interesting language developed by the penguiners.... (Slate has an interesting article on the topic.)

Also, to revive one's little girl in you (well, in some of you, anyway), please take a look at Barbie.com (yes, it exists, and no, it does not fuffill any specific societal mission or even developmental role for its users). Be prepare of a pink attack on the website.

In all fairness, I checked for the guy side and, yes, GI Joe has its own website, although his saving the world apparently prevented him from fully investing himself in social networking. Barbie, on the other hand, since she broke up with Ken, seems to need quite frequent makeovers before she can move on to Myspace and meet new friends.

Education 2.0

A lot of thoughts is given, these days, onto the potential of web 2.0 applications to revive instructional methods. An interesting experiment, related here, had Second Life as an educational platform. Second life was viewed both as the platform for teaching delivery (virtual classroom) and as the subject of teaching (online ethnography).

With creativity, such experiments can certainly revive more traditional Management of Information Systems classes.

The LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) center, funded by the NSF, provides a wealth of ideas and information onto how to be innovative and effective in these new learning environments.

Keeping it consistent

It depends how you count it

A new study from researchers from Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Liverpool, whose results have been summarized in the Chronicles of Higher Education, reveal what many of us already sensed:

Social networking applications do not increase the number of strong links that people have but rather, they drastically increase their weaker links.

The study investigated users of social networking applications and showed that these users often claim 150 to 200 "friends", but that they also recognize that they have about 5 core friends, on average. Incidentally, the people who are not users of social networking applications also consider that they have 5 core friends.

Myspace and Facebook are therefore really useful to expand one's world of weak links (always useful for job search and for fun), but building stronger links is a more selective process.