Gilad Ravid and Sheizaf Rafaeli’s new piece in FirstMonday, “Asynchronous Discussion Groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks“, analyzes a voluntary learning community that develops on a university’s LMS. These are all students who are (apparently) registered for on-campus web-enhanced courses with strictly voluntary web-enhanced components. Interestingly, the study analyzed networking for the entire group of online participants across course boundaries. So the results are for the network characteristics of the entire online student body, as opposed to the network characteristics of student participation in individual courses. Ravid and Rafaeli find that the community formed by the students appears to be both a Small World and a Scale Free network.
What does this mean? (more…)