It’s not often that you find a graduate thesis that is actually fun to read, but that’s exactly what I found in Revealing individual and collective pasts: Visualization of online social archives by Fernanda Bertini Viegas, an alumna of MIT’s Media Lab. The bibliography alone is worth the trip; she does an amazing job of pulling together a critical mass of the credible literature on online social interaction (which can be hard to find amid all the garbage that’s churned out). Beyond that, her empirical research into visualization tools is fascinating. There’s a lot here that we can use to improve online learning environments.
In this first post, I’ll review some high-level lessons that can be gleaned from the paper regarding best teaching practices in today’s learning environments. In my next post, I’ll follow up with some analysis about how this research can be used to improve those environments.