Pesquisa - 100 mil pessoas foram rastreadas pelo celular, por meio dos sinais de ligações e envio e recepção de mensagens de texto. Resultado: o padrão do ser humano é previsível. A maioria se desloca para o trabalho e escola e volta para casa. Do total de pesquisados, praticamente 75% restringiram-se a um raio de 32 km.

Um dos resultados do estudo "Mobile phones demystify commuter rat race" publicado na Nature, segundo Albert-Laszló Barabási, da Northeastern University (EUA), pode ajudar epidemiologistas a prever como vírus podem se espalhar em populações, auxiliando urbanistas, por exemplo, a realocar recursos.

O estudo aponta padrões que podem parecer óbvios, disse Barabási, que coordenou a pesquisa. No site da Nature, ele afirma que "ao olhar para a população como um todo, não há como descrever os padrões. O problema ao responder a essa pergunta é que as pessoas normalmente não são rastreadas, mas hoje somos rastreados graças aos celulares que carregamos".

O que o estudioso fez - Barabási e seus colegas conseguiram autorização de uma operadora de telefonia móvel, sob a condição de anonimato, monitorar chamadas e mensagens de textos de 100 mil pessoas ao longo de seis meses.

Privacidade - O estudo de Barabási enfrenta alguns desafios. Por questões contratuais, a pesquisa não pode divulgar em que país foi feita. Isso pode, no entanto, afetar os padrões de hábitos variados em países diferentes. Dirk Brockmann (Northwestern University - Illinois, ), que tentou analisar o movimento de mais de meio milhão de cédulas de um dólar durante cinco anos, diz que a questão agora é descobrir por que algo tão complexo como o movimento humano segue padrões tão consistentes. "Nenhum estudo pode responder a essa questão."

Em tempo: se alguém quiser rastrear Barabási, é indispensável a leitura de "Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means". Foi publicado em 2000 e é atualíssimo.

There are scouts, those who go ahead and explore the landscape and discover the possibilities. They are followed by early settlers who arrive immediately after and discover uses of the landscape and begin to build a new settlement. Following them are those who've heard the tales of a new world and made the decision to join the experiment. Those who remained behind had one of two options; ignore the new world developing out of their immediate sight, or become a facilitator for the development while maintaining the necessities and structures of the old settlements that supported the new.

This post started rattling around my head a couple of weeks ago while I was on the elliptical at the gym. I was reading Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi while I was trying to sweat off the pounds accumulating while I read my RSS feeds. I had begun this book previously, but left it bookmarked on the shelf for quite a awhile, until a tweet by @bokardo (his blog) that eventually led me to his Amazon list of must read books. Linked was listed and I pulled it off the shelf and stared anew. I had begun the book before I was Twitterized, even before I started to seriously blog about EdTech. The book took on a new dimension this time and my brain went into overdrive as I considered it's message in light of Twitter, Ning's such as Classroom 2.0, Slideshare, Diigo, and the list goes on.

The more I read, the more I focused on my experience with my Twitter stream. I find my stream to be the place I discover much insight and wisdom, as well as information and directions to great ideas on the web. There is a large EdTech community within Twitter and the flow of information and exchange of ideas is far beyond anything I experienced as a classroom teacher for 20+ years. Since being Twitterized, I have often thought of a Tom Peters' quote I read in Re-imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age,

A New Social Contract. Societies that educate their young to break the rules and invent vivid new futures.

This appears to be the attitude of the network of EdTech practitioners and evangelists I follow on Twitter. There is a strong network that has emerged and nurtured itself there, so as I was reading and running in place I grabbed my phone and tweeted the following three tweets:

I was struck by the cocktail party picture that Barabasi was playing with early in the book, using it as a description of the process of network formation. The path that information can travel seems to be something like a drop of water gathering with others to form a trickle, the trickle ending up in a rivulet, the rivulet to a stream, and on to a tributary, to a river, to the sea. There is power in the social joining of similar minds. With the Internet and social networks it happens at a significantly greater pace than that - but the idea works for me.

Barabasi's "Third Link" brought the idea of "six degrees of separation" to the discussion in my head and this is where the thoughts began to coalesce.

"Six degrees of separation is intriguing because it suggests that, despite our society's enormous size, it can easily be navigated by following social links from one person to another - a network or six billion nodes in which any pair of nodes are on average six links from each other."

Now, the idea of six degrees of separation has been made somewhat trite by public media (old media primarily), but it has proven, over time, to be a reliable theory. No, this isn't a book review, so here is the next connection that surfaced as I was reading.

I regularly pick up new links to Twitter toys via the Twitter Freaks group on Diigo (started by Lucy Gray of Infinite Thinking Machine and High Techpectations). Just prior to my reading I had been playing with TweetWheel a tool developed by Augusto Becciu and plotted my network:

I noticed some interesting things. First, some of the EdTech practitioners I followed also follow tech industry icons such as Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, and Cali Lewis or information outlets such as Ars Techinca, but not many. Now that isn't a big deal, just interesting. The second thing I noticed was that none of the above were following any EdTech practitioners, evangelists, or bloggers that I an following, now that I found disconcerting. The final observation was how many of the EdTech's I was following were following each other - the web was amazing.

Here's the rub. There is such a wonderful network of EdTech's thinking, sharing, learning, growing within the Twitter universe (and other places, but Twitter was on my mind) . . . BUT . . . isn't this just preaching to the choir? I remember how wonderful it was, while I was in the classroom, to run into another educator who had visions for how technology was going to re-invent the learning environment in their classroom. There is an amazing energy that is generated by that interaction. Even more exciting was the rare situation when a teacher sitting nearby would interrupt the discussion, eventually joining in, and getting excited about beginning to bring tech tools and applications into their classrooms for the first time.

It is that last experience that ties this all together. Before Twitter, I didn't have any contact with @ijohnpederson, @mrplough07, @lsshanks or @markwagner, I didn't know who they were much less that they were involved in the EdTech arena. Through Twitter I gained access to their current thoughts and ideas, their blogs, and most importantly I reduced the six degrees of separation to ZERO. No this isn't a pro-Twitter rant, it is a chance to point out that not only did I reduce the distance between the people I follow from six to zero, but I also reduced the distance between the people they work with and want to influence (think the ones following the early settlers) from six to one. This network is the strongest tool possible for making massive change in the way education happens. This network is directly connected to other strong EdTech networks giving it added strength with each connection.

How can I help those in my Twitter stream or my friends at Classroom 2.0 make a difference in their educational venues? How can I allow them to enter my classroom or school and help me make a difference there? There are many options, such as responding when someone I follow is presenting Twitter as part of a Web 2.0 enhanced approach to classroom re-invention, staff development, or professional growth. I can share the links I gather using my Twitter stream + Yahoo Pipes + my RSS Feed aggregater in the most advantageous way in my building. I can print hard copies of their blog posts, as well as send links via email to teachers within my building (or that I have worked with over the years), addressing the things I have heard them talk about in the lounge, the halls, or the parking lot. By doing this, I bring these great voices from six degrees away, to one, and then to zero. I can effectively bring you, the EdTech's from my social networks, into the classroom of many other teachers that you would not otherwise have any contact with. Hopefully, your insight, wisdom, and vision will inspire and encourage and the movement to re-imagine education will grow exponentially - that would be the true releasing of the power of the EdTech network I have discovered in the Web 2.0 world - which would change the answer to my third tweet from May 5:

We increase our listening audience by reducing the degrees of separation between good teachers and good ideas and by increasing each others sphere of influence. Barabasi said in the introduction to Linked ,

". . . we live in a small world, where everything is linked to everything else."

Hope you won't mind when I link you and your ideas with other great teachers and watch how things can change.

Blogs of Twitter-ers I mentioned above:

@ijohnpederson: IJOHNPEDERSON

@mrplough07: The Next Step

@lsshanks: 2020 Nexus

@markwagner: Educational Technology and Life

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Cette impulsion de collection est synonyme d'un autre besoin profond et pressant : le besoin de statut. À la différence des portraits peints que les membres de la classe moyenne d’autrefois chargeaient de signifier leur position d’élite lorsqu’ils grimpaient les échelons, les sites de réseaux nous permettent de créer du statut – et non seulement de le commémorer une fois acquis. C’est pourquoi la plupart des profils de vedettes sur MySpace sont faux, souvent créés par des fans : les célébrités n’ont pas besoin de 800 amis pour prouver leur importance. C’est le reste de la population, en quête d’une célébrité paroissiale, qui en a besoin.  Warhol l'avait bien prédit...

Mais cette quête de statut a un incontournable partenaire: l’angoisse. L'entretien de son statut sur MySpace ou Facebook demande une vigilance permanente. Comme l’écrivait un jeune de 24 ans dans le New York Times : "je suis obsédé par les témoignages et j’en réclame constamment. C’est la monnaie sociale ultime : les déclarations publiques d’une relation intime… Chaque profil est une campagne média soigneusement montée".

Ces sites sociaux ont été réfléchis pour ceci. Décrivant le travail de B.J. Fogg de l’université de Stanford, qui étudie les "stratégies de persuasion" utilisées par les sites sociaux pour encourager la participation, The New Scientist explique : "le secret est de lier l’acquisition d’amis, de compliments et de statut – des gâteries pour lesquelles les humains travaillent dur- aux activités qui mettent en valeur le site". Comme le racontait Fogg au magazine, "vous offrez aux gens un contexte où acquérir un statut, et ils vont travailler pour ce statut".

Le théoricien des réseaux Albert-László Barabási note que les connections en ligne suivent la règle de "l’attachement préférentiel", c'est-à-dire que "si l’on prend deux profils, dont l’une a deux fois plus de liens que l’autre, à peu près deux fois plus de gens choisiront de se relier à la page la plus connectée". Résultat, "alors que nos choix individuels sont très imprévisibles, en tant que groupe nous suivons des figures strictes". En poursuivant comme des lemmings le statut en ligne via la collection de centaines d’ "amis", nous respectons clairement cette règle.

Que signifie donc finalement ce désir de statut en ligne pour la communauté et l’amitié ? En écrivant dans les années 1980 les Habitudes du cœur, le sociologiste Robert Bellah et ses collègues montrèrent le passage des communautés traditionnelles, tricotées localement, à des "enclaves de style de vie" largement définies par "les loisirs et la consommation".

Peut-être aujourd’hui avons-nous migrés au-delà même de ces enclaves de style de vie vers des "enclaves de personnalité" - des lieux virtuelles isolées au sein desquelles nous pouvons devenir des personnages différents (et parfois contradictoires), avec des groupes différents d’amis alter-ego souvent intermittents.

Lada Adamic, from Stanford University, recently investigated communities discovered by searching for the phrases “abortion pro-choice” and “abortion pro-life”.  The pro-life query resulted in a core of 41 documents in which you could get from each page to the other ones.  In contrast, the pro-choice movement was fragmented into many disconnected sites.  Such differences in the structure of competing communities have important consequences for their ability to market and organize themselves for a common cause. 

As Adamic notes, the campaign against the partial birth abortion bill launched from the middle of the pro-life cluster could easily reach other pro-life sites, since there are many links between them.  Furthermore, due to the links on the pro-choice sites, the visitors of pro-choice sites would also learn about it.  However, one would need to advertise at several disconnected pro-choice websites to achieve an equally efficient campaign against the bill.  Therefore, not only does the pro-life community have a better presence on the web, it is also better organized; its sites are more aware of each other.

Both communities are surely made up of dedicated, passionate people.  But they are not equal, according to Adamic.  By being better connected internally, the pro-life community is a more effective group on the web.  Pay close attention to how your community is organized internally--it could mean all the difference in competition with other communities.

Here's an academic study by Adamic on the structure and organization of a community at Stanford.