... network in history". There were some very nice suggestions such as: The network of international health care professionals linked together after experiencing outbreaks like the SARS. The solar system - which networks planets Evolution - as a self-assembled network that led to higher life forms on Earth The brain - a dynamic, thinking and emotional network The Internet - speed of information flow and repository of data I think you might agree with me that those are all good examples. At least one important and immensely successful network is missing off this list: ...

One of the nice things about FaceBook is that you're always uncovering interesting new angles on the people you know. Dominique Lowenthal alerted me to this exhibition of her photographs taking place on flickr. Interestingly, Dominique took all these photos with her mobile phone, which is embarrassing for those of us with digital SLRs. She credits the quality of her work to the "wonderful and insightful feedback I have through my Flickr friends" - another endorsement of the learning power inherent within social networking. Take a look - I think Dominique's a real talent.

I had an interesting comment from Mark on my article on Applying Social Networking in the Workplace. This statement got me thinking: I think social networks within an organisation will become tremendously useful - think of the opportunities for knowledge sharing through the creation of pools of expertise across the organisation consisting of people who would otherwise be locked into ...

These guys keep crankin' 'em out. I love it! Social Networking is also Social Learning. I think deepest learning comes from human connections and Social Networking tools make it easier than ever to connect to the people you want to learn something from, or with whom you are willing to learn with, together, collaboratively. Before there was online social networking I remember reading business books about the power of the "rollodex": Important successful people ALWAYS had a massive rollodex. At the time I remember thinking about the dozen or so people that I had on a piece ...

I wrote this article back in November for Learning Technologies magazine. I'm placing it here as a matter of record and to note that social networking tools are clearly important to accelerating the (effective) learning process. --------------------------------- We are social animals by nature, so any technology that allows us to connect more efficiently and effectively with others will ...

Data can tell amazing stories. Just listen to Hans Rosling from the TED conference and you'll get what I mean. ComScore has released their data on Social Networking today and it's pretty incredible. Facebook.com has increased 270% since June 2006 . I knew the buzz was growing about it over the last year and so I tried it out. Now I'm hooked. Its LinkedIn and Facebook only for me. Okay...maybe I still Twitter a little bit ;-) ...

... every month or so in a restaurant on Brighton seafront. The discussion centred on social networking: "The explosion of social networking sites in recent years has prompted some serious reflection on the state of modern friendship. While many ... users. Of the 16 hours that regular internet users spend online a week, 11 hours are spent social networking (hardly ... all convinced that social networking is in any way a cause of this state of affairs, not least because the phenomenon was in evidence long before social networking came on the scene. It seems likely to me that more credible reasons for ...

... great social networking features that make it easy to share your knowledge and establish connections with others in ...

Last week I spoke at the Triangle OD Network's Annual Meeting. We were fortunate to have close to 100 folks show ... represented as nodes in a pervasive and persistent network that is aware of who they are; what they are capable of doing; and ... pouring content into people’s heads. It’s more practical to think of learning as optimizing our networks.” Optimized human intuition networks create a meaningful context within which content can be consumed and digested ... able to network and tap into resource nodes to address a surfaced need within another part of the network will be able ...

I know there's a lot of social networking tools out there, but looking purely at the educational possibilities, I quite like the look of Infodit .  Intodit allows you to establish a group site with a combination of wiki and forum functionality. It does this without undue complication and I can see it being a great way of focusing attention on an educational topic or project. By the way, I joined the Coldplay fan group!

Facebook buys Parakey Facebook has just acquired an Operating System. A WHAT? Why in the heck, would a social networking company buy an OS company? From INSIDE FACEBOOK So what they also get are the 2 brains behind the creation of Firefox. Firefox's incredible flexibility and openness is what made it attractive to the Facebook folks. Facebook opened up to developers and now it has blown away the competition. Firefox did the same and grew quickly as the #1 alternative to IE. eLearning and Social Networking When I talk about social networking apps being something to watch in ...

There were some interesting stats in the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's People Management magazine last week, in an article entitled Face to face with social networking. Apparently, in the UK: 20% of firms use social networking sites to research applications. 68% use search engines to check candidates. 70% of London firms block the use of Facebook at work. 51% of recruiters think social networking poses a challenge to traditional recruitment. 60% of firms would check a candidate's blog. 65% of university students are Facebook users. Facebook's ...

Just a suggestion for sociological research in social networking software's. In a divorce you want to do two things: split up everything of value and leave the past behind while moving on without too much of a hassle. Facebook and other social networking sites make this virtually impossible. You know how it goes. You split up, you divide books, cd's ... that are 'your' friends. And because your friends are polite, they add your ex-partner to their network. By now you are ... there is something like a constraining order for social networks? I am lucky, my ex-partners and I get along just ...

... of weeks later, my expectations remain very fuzzy. Obviously I have a professional interest in social networking and am ... obviously not alone in my aspirations. Brent Schenkler points to the latest data on social networking sites, which shows how ... . We are taking social networking to an extreme where it will seem like too much of good thing. Getting bombarded ...

Tony Karrer of the eLearning Technology blog invited me to take part in a new site called eLearning Learning . This new site brings a collection of ed tech related blogs together making it very easy to research a variety of topics without jumping from blog to blog. Tony describes it best with this quote; "This is the beginning of a community portal where the community will help to collect and organize the best content from blogs and web sites. The goal is to create a place where it's relatively easy to find current content and highly relevant content surrounding eLearning." - Tony ...

Wilfred Rubens who keeps on delivering great insights on eLearning on his blog (Dutch) has directed me to the superb wiki of George Siemens on Facebook and its benefits as a social network service. This wiki was one of the results of a workshop he did on facebook at the University of Manitoba. The wiki gives a nice overview of when which social network was started. After that he zooms into Facebook with a good analyses on pro's and cons if you want to use it in a ... social media. Read her blog for some really great insights into social networks and media. She writes with ...

I (along with a lot of others) am currently beta-testing Twine , a new network which, to quote their site, is "powered by semantic understanding". Again, per their site, " Twine automatically organizes information, learns about your interests and makes connections and recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it understands your interests and the more useful it becomes.". For a good definition of a semantic network, please see this Wikipedia entry . One good feature is the group setup (groups are referred to as twines). Postings to one twine can be shared with ...

The more and more I get into the OpenSource Learning project with the Masie Consortium, the more I see the incredible possibilities. XplanaZine has taken the social networking idea in the world of quiz creation . Cool! I hadn't thought of that yet. Multiple people helping to craft the perfect assessments instead of random content experts writing their own and trying to be tricky...or worse funny. I'm sure you all have taken a quiz where the last choice is always something completely off-the-wall, or goofy...Yikes, I've even written a few of those in my past. "According ...

Scaling the Social Web . The article tells us that various players are adding social networking features to their sites: A ... networking features to their online destinations, letting users create detailed Web identities, connect with people over ... networking features for a long time? Granted they are being enhanced, but still. And doesn't Flickr (images), del.icio.us (bookmarks), etc. all have a social networking aspect to them? The point is that its probably natural for lots of sites to have social networking type features and functions for visitors. This is something we are commonly doing on sites ...

Networks. Here are some thoughts on this topic, especially thoughts around social networks for learning. Starting with Social Networking was a blessing and a curse. Social networks have a tendency to be a bit messy. Virginia Yonkers told us - I would like to know how to manage the information flows in social networks. I have been part of Ning groups before ... how to ignore the chatter. How do we do this in the social network environment? And, I think that the course fell right ... , but it's also how conversation, content spread across social networks. Still, if I ask, what would I want to ...

This month's question comes out of part of the dialog that occur during the recent Work Literacy course . While discussing social networking for personal learning, the question came up around being able to reach out and get help from people or find expertise in the form of a person / conversation. Thus, for November we are exploring: Network Feedback In Getting Help , I discussed some aspects of the central question being raised. I've got a question about a work task and would like to get feedback from someone (a person, hopefully with some level of experience and ...

This month's question comes out of part of the dialog that occur during the recent Work Literacy course . While discussing social networking for personal learning, the question came up around being able to reach out and get help from people or find expertise in the form of a person / conversation. Thus, for November we are exploring: Network Feedback In Getting Help , I discussed some aspects of the central question being raised. I've got a question about a work task and would like to get feedback from someone (a person, hopefully with some level of experience and ...

... offices, social networking-style technologies are quickly becoming a very real possibility for even the most ...

1) from elearningpost - MIT Video John Seely Brown 2) from Dion Hinchcliffe - Social Media Goes ...

Over the last 12 weeks, Stephen Downes and I have facilitated a course on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge . The final “project” for enrolled participants is to reflect on the quality of their own learning networks. Wendy Drexler has posted a video of her final project that is (deservedly) getting significant attention: Connectivism: Networked Learner ( also available on YouTube ) ...

Luis Suarez and Dennis McDonald have posted about the issues with the large number of social networking sites: Your Single Social Network - ClaimID and Identity 2.0 to the Rescue? Is There Such a Thing as "Social Networking Fatigue"? In these posts they discuss the fact that with as many social networking sites (and I would add other kinds of Web ... several conversations recently where someone wanted me to be involved in their network and my strong suggestion was to figure out how to use my blog's RSS feed within their network so I could continue to do what I'm doing now, but allow me ...

... recognize the "social graph"-the network of relationships a person has, independent of any given networking system or ... that we face right now that I described in Social Networking Entrepreneurial Opportunities on my SoCal CTO Blog ... with was the statement that: The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content. First, I don't necessarily consider the social operating system to be "next generation social networking" - rather it's a layer that allows ...

I'm debating the value of forum / group / threaded discussion software vs. social network software for a particular ... center around threaded discussions . Generally are easy to get into. Options are simple. Social Network Examples are Ning and KickApps . They center around individuals . They form a network of people via interactions, groups, etc. Being a network, they generally are a little harder for people to understand. However, they typically try to ... - classic threaded discussion view - or a personal home page with all that is happening in the network. Some thoughts ...

Jon Chase from Popular Science recently wrote an article on the etiquette of social networking sites . Ultimately, he is still pro-social networking sites, but he raises a lot of good points about the etiquette on these sites. Excerpt from the article... Once you've joined a social-network site and built up a profile, it becomes a free-for-all. Too many of us think it's perfectly reasonable to spam complete strangers into joining their network of "friends," with no ... with different social networking sites (plus receiving all of the "Great Saving" emails from any number of ...

I just read David Warlicks' post - I Just Don't Get it Yet â€" Social Networks where he discusses his recent experience with several Ning generated social networks including: I've joined Library 2.0 , School 2.0 , and Classroom 2.0 ... dull to know it. So please explain. I've tried out several social network tools and have had a similar reaction. I ... people joined the network, I would join to be able to participate - but - that's not really going to happen. If you watched the Brandon Hall network fail or have participated in Elgg then it shouldn't really come as much of a surprise ...