Where Wireless, Social Networks, and Education Intersect
By Anna Lynn Spitzer
 Robert Beck, UCI professor and Calit² Education layer leader |
And what about the relevance of these devices to education? Educators have long known that peer interactions outside the classroom are important to learning, but these kinds of technologies make such interactions not only more likely but quite possibly qualitatively different. So does wireless telecommunication transform the way university students learn? How can students' access to technology build on existing social networks and spontaneously formed networks with strangers to enhance their educational achievement?
These are just some of the questions that Beck and colleagues want to explore. What's particularly interesting about them is that they probe the distinction between education -- which traditionally has meant classroom activity, homework, and exams -- and social interaction. In effect, Beck and colleagues wonder, is this kind of distinction relevant any longer? Couldn't friendship groups become educational groups? And, given the emergence of this technology, don't we see signs of this already?
"In short, we're looking to study how PDAs and the new tablet PCs affect the formation and evolution of social networks, which, in turn, are expected to affect educational achievement," explains Beck.
Technology Supporting Emergence of New Communities
The availability of high-fidelity wireless services (so-called Wi-Fi) has created an opportunity for students to meet others of similar interests with whom they might form long-term networks. This type of social telecommunications structure is novel because it's not institution-based, such as on a work environment, a school, or a religion. Rather, it's a network that exists amorphously in cyberspace that can be activated at any time based on commonality of interests.
This aspect especially interests Beck's collaborator Ender Ayanoglu, Director of the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing at UCI, who is working on development of a Wi-Fi environment as a creative meeting place. Ayanoglu, Beck, and colleagues expect to develop and apply Social Organizer Software that permits potential members of a network to view selected information about all other participants prior to making physical contact in a Wi-Fi environment. Participants would be able to access map displays of the locations of all others participants, enabling them to associate rapidly among "strangers." "By using software to form these networks," says Beck, "we hope to increase our chances to recruit and develop intelligent social networks throughout UCI's undergraduate population."
Technology Supporting Learning Communities
"The faculty members in our department," says Beck, "are training teachers increasingly through electronic discussion forums, which enable the teachers-in-training to share and respond to fieldwork observations. We're trying to link these students through technology into learning communities."
Beck thinks we may have aimed too high to structure learning communities that attempt to include all students. But smaller social networks linked through telecommunications devices and supported by meaningful, educationally relevant activities have a chance of evolving beyond using simple functional communications like "when is the fieldwork assignment due?" to acquiring more meaningful knowledge.
"We are poised," says Beck, "to support the growth of an advanced social structure, a peer network that knows how to share information and mutually support each other's learning."
Technology Supporting Social Cohesion
And, because handhelds support frequent and informal exchanges, notes Beck, they may serve also as an effective tool to support group cohesion. If technology fosters more cohesion among college-age early adopters, as these young people enter the work place, their behavior might begin to set a new standard for more cohesive corporations and other public communities.
Applying Various Models from Social Network Analysis
The wireless telecommunications environment is an ideal subject for the tools of social network analysis. Social network analysis, to which heightened attention has been given since 9/11, is the 50-year-old interdisciplinary social science of connectivity whose goal is to understand how networks are organized in terms of the flow of communications among all possible combinations of pair contacts.
Beck is interested in applying a "competitive model" of networks in which individuals in online discussion groups appear to compete for links with other members. For example, networks may have centers or hubs - individuals who send and receive the most messages and have the most diverse partnerships - that may play dynamic organizational roles in their networks. Or networks may be more loosely organized into a core of individuals who form an in-group that reciprocates heavily among themselves but that does not communicate as much with a peripheral group of relative loners.
Another model that will be applied is a "cooperative model" based on specialized interests and content developed by Doug White, an anthropologist at UCI. This model explains the formation of networks as the effect of each node's (individual's) information about other nodes' activities in the network. As nodes determine who is interacting with whom, they become attracted to one or more cohesive hierarchies, which themselves can consist of multiple local clusters. So networks explained by this model might lack the hubs important to Beck's model, being based on nodes' tendency to join in the formation of clusters or nuggets in a "small world."
UCSD's Sixth College as "Student Testbed"
Calit² colleagues at UCSD's new Sixth College, whose theme is Art, Culture, and Technology, are interested in these issues as well. Sixth College Provost and Calit² Education layer leader Gabriele Wienhausen, computer scientist Bill Griswold, and visual arts professor Adriene Jenik are conducting an experiment to study "early adopters" of wireless services. With the support of Hewlett Packard Corporation, the entering freshman class of 285 students was supplied, last fall, with iPAQs, high-powered Pocket PC-operated personal digital assistants. E-mail, discussion forums, peer location searches, and software applications have been made available through these devices. It is estimated that tens of thousands of messages have been sent and received already, with all to/from addresses and time stamps recorded.
The research team seeks to discover the "entire cohort of communications networks" at the college and explore the variety of social structures characterizing these groups. Their longer-term hope is to recruit the most promising groups under "human subjects" guidelines and provide them with information services and methods to help them evolve into more capable, more "intelligent" networks.
Given the slowdown in technology industries, the availability of such a clearly delineated wireless user group "testbed" like the students at Sixth College offers an unprecedented opportunity to study early adopters and use the results to plan development of the infrastructure. College students, who have voluntarily opted to use wireless communications in their social and educational lives, are expected to be predictive of the needs and trends that lie ahead.
Says Wienhausen, "At Sixth College, we see wireless as part of a larger picture of employing - and exploiting - technology to improve learning, interaction, and community building, and increasing creativity. We want all our students to become fluent in technology so they can understand both its power and its problems - its ethical, political, and cultural implications - and can participate in a broad-based discussion."