Are you a weak tie?

Here is another slide from Valdis Krebs presentation that caught my attention.

Email Clusters

There’s hope for lurkers, the inhibited, the shy, the intimidated and the lacking in confidence people here! This slide shows people with strong and frequent interactions /connections linked with the dark lines. But as the slide shows very clearly, without the weak ties to hold them all together, the network would collapse! So we shouldn’t underestimate the importance or significant of the weak ties!

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Do we have the full picture?

This was another interesting slide from Valdis Krebs

Here we have a view of what is going on behind the organisational hierarchy, i.e. the connections in the white space (grey lines) that are being made to get the job done.

So in this course, or in any course,

• How much ‘back-channelling’ is going on?
• How many people are making a significant contribution without anyone being aware of it or even being aware of it themselves?
• How many people have deliberately chosen to inhabit the white space even if that is an unfamiliar term?

I find this intriguing as there has been such a lot of talk in the foums and blogs about dominant characters and their effect on the course, whereas in fact there could be an awful lot going on in the white space that we are mostly unaware of, but is still having an effect on the course. Fascinating and well worth thinking about from a teaching perspective.

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Valdis Krebs on Networks

This was a great presentation – very engaging, although my head was physically hurting by the end – and well summarised here by Stephen Downes – http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=136

I think what I liked so much about it was that it was as if we were listening to a series of stories. I could relate to almost all the networks described by Valdis Krebs and illustrated by his slides.

Two particular slides were of particular interest to me:

1. Communities of Practice

Here we have 3 communities, the green, the grey and the blue all internally networked. It is the external consultants (the pink) who connect these separate communities. They are on the peripheries of the communities and yet are likely to have power and influence – or is this an assumption? If it is not simply an assumption, then what is the relationship between power, influence and expertise and the number of connections?

2. Online Networks

I think everyone was interested in this one as it seems to depict exactly what is going on in this course. But supposing the number of people and the people themselves were exactly those currently represented at the centre – would we still then see this network pattern – is it simply a function of its size or is it reflective of the nature of online relationships and working?

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