The Triple Revolution---the coming together of the turn to social networks, the personalized internet, and accessible mobile connectivity---has fostered networked individualism. This has implications for learning analytics, in the need to move beyond analyzing bounded groups and aggregates of individuals to taking into account complex, partial networks of social relationships.

Communities are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. With regard to communities, social capital captures the structural, relational and cognitive aspects of the relationships among their members. Social capital is defined as a set of properties of a social entity (e.g. norms, level of trust, and intensive social networking) which enables joint activities and cooperation for mutual benefit. It can be understood as the glue which holds communities together. On this panel we will discuss whether and how information technology can strengthen communities by fostering social capital.

Abstract Many authors have posited a social component in citation, the consensus being that the citers and citees often have interpersonal as well as intellectual ties. Evidence for this belief has been rather meager, however, in part because social networks researchers have lacked bibliometric data (e.g., pairwise citation counts from online databases), and citation analysts have lacked sociometric data (e.g., pairwise measures of acquaintanceship). In 1997 Nazer extensively measured personal relationships and communication behaviors in what we call “Globenet,” an international group of 16 researchers from seven disciplines that was established in 1993 to study human development. Since Globenet's membership is known, it was possible during 2002 to obtain citation records for all members in databases of the Institute for Scientific Information. This permitted examination of how members cited each other (intercited) in journal articles over the past three decades and in a 1999 book to which they all contributed. It was also possible to explore links between the intercitation data and the social and communication data. Using network‐analytic techniques, we look at the growth of intercitation over time, the extent to which it follows disciplinary or interdisciplinary lines, whether it covaries with degrees of acquaintanceship, whether it reflects Globenet's organizational structure, whether it is associated with particular in‐group communication patterns, and whether it is related to the cocitation of Globenet members. Results show cocitation to be a powerful predictor of intercitation in the journal articles, while being an editor or coauthor is an important predictor in the book. Intellectual ties based on shared content did better as predictors than content‐neutral social ties like friendship. However, interciters in Globenet communicated more than did noninterciters.

No abstract available.

We use a social network approach to examine how work and friendship ties in a university research group were associated with the kinds of media used for different kinds of information exchange. The use of electronic mail, unscheduled face-to-face encounters, and scheduled face-to-face meetings predominated for the exchange of six kinds of information: Receiving Work, Giving Work, Collaborative Writing, Computer Programming, Sociability, and Major Emotional Support. Few pairs used synchronous desktop videoconferencing or the telephone. E-mail was used in similar ways as face-to-face communication. The more frequent the contact, the more “multiplex” the tie: A larger number of media was used to exchange a greater variety of information. The closeness of work ties and of friendship ties were each independently associated with more interaction: A greater frequency of communication, the exchange of more kinds of information, and the use of more media. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

No abstract available.

A media space is a system that uses integrated video, audio, and computers to aHow individuals and groups to work together despite being distributed spatially and temporally. Our media space, CAVECAT (Computer Audio Video Enhanced Collaboration And Telepresence), enables a small number of individuals or groups located in separate offices to engage in collaborative work without leaving their offices. This paper presents and summarizes our experiences during initial use of CAVECAT, including unsolved technological obstacles we have encountered, and the psychological and social impact of the technology. Where possible we discuss relevant findings from the psychological literature, and implications for design of the next-generation media space.