Last week the course focused on network characteristics and attributes. As usual, I´m having a harder time with the neural aspects of networks and connections than with the social. I found the Network for Newbies presentation, by Barry Wellman, helpful to put netwoks in context. He differentiates between 3 ways to look at reality:
- Categories: Possess one or more common properties (men, developed countries)
- Groups: United within a tight boundary (family, work group)
- Networks: Set of connected units (friendship, organizational, Internet)
We will be seeing more about the differences between networks and groups this week, but a few characteristics that distinguish networks are, according to Wellman:
- they are “more than the sum of its parts”
- they consist of one or more nodes
- they are self-shaping and reflexive
- they scale up to networks of networks
Having understood networks better within their context, a concept that really struck me was dealt with during the Elluminate session: synchronization, which is literally:
1. to happen at the same time
2. to represent or arrange (events) to indicate coincidence or coexistence
(Merriem-Webster Online Dictionary)
Here´s the visual example of synchronization George Siemens and Stephen Downes showed during the session:
Since I have a harder time with the neural aspects, what really attracted me about synchronization is its social aspect: how it is a natural tendency and how it can be a dangerous limitation. We tend to synchronize with people “like us”, people who agree with us, share our viewpoints. That feels good, and yet interacting with people we don´t naturally synchronize with is much more enriching, it adds new possibilities we might not have thought of when we get trapped in comfortable “endogamic” connecting. So it´s a lost opportunity not to focus on interacting with people who don´t share our views, who take very different stands, who challenge our ideas and make us look for answers to unexpected questions.
