Category: Learning

6.6 Degrees of separation on average

Stanley Milgram was a very innovative social experimenter. I will keep his experiments on authority for another blog post and instead will focus on his Small world experiment, which I have always found fascinating.

In 1969 he tried to figure out whether the world was becoming a “small world” network by sending out packages to random people in the US and asking them to try and get the package in as little steps as possible to a contact in Boston. His research showed that people in the US seemed to be connected through three friendship links on average.

Some students later invented the “six degrees of kevin bacon” game (connecting each film actor to Bacon in 6 film cast lists or fewer) which popularised the term “six degrees of separation”.

Milgram’s research methodology had some problems and later attempts to redo the experiment using e-mail were never very successful (I personally tried to do a version of the experiment with my highschool students which failed miserably).

According to the Guardian Microsoft has now finally proved the theory using raw data from their messaging logs. The average degrees of separation globally (by people that use MSN at least) seems to be 6.6:

Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people in various countries, according to the Washington Post. This was ‘the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available,’ they observed. The database covered all the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, equivalent to roughly half the world’s instant-messaging traffic at that time.

This is an example of a new way of doing research. The amount of data that is being collected by some technology companies is so massive that you don’t need a theory anymore, you can just look at the patterns instead (see Wired’s The End of Theory).

What could this mean for learning? Imagine the amount of things we could find out about how people learn if we would have an equivalent of MSN or Facebook in the learning space! What would all Moodle logs combined tell us about how learning technology is used?

Which organisation will be the first to leverage our small world and use it for learning?

Whiplash the cowboy monkey

Right now I am in Dallas for a two day training. I am teaching a dozen learning designers how to use some of the more advanced Moodle features.

I have learnt a lot in the couple of days that I have been here. For example that is possible to have a skating ring inside a shopping mall when it is 40 degrees Celsius outside and that you do not only have drive-ins for food but also for general groceries, pharmacies, ATM’s and even for donations (drop off those old clothes without getting out of the car!).

I also went to see the Mesquite Championship Rodeo. I had never been to a rodeo before and I thought it was a great event. They did bull riding, broke back horse riding, roping (with headers and heelers) and barrel riding. It is probably one of the only sports where women earn more money than men. This is because they do the barrel riding, which is truly one of the most exciting horse events I have ever seen. They have to race their horse around three barrels in a clover pattern and they do this at an incredibly high speed.

The highlight of the evening was Whiplash the cowboy monkey. This is a 21 year old Capuchin Monkey who has been “riding” on border collies herding sheep for over 18 years. Check him out:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYNoQZ5djUA]

To me the real star of the show was the dog. I am always impressed when I see dogs herding sheep. Training animals is a real art and I always wonder whether those same techniques could somehow transfer over to training human beings. Would my course for the learning designers been (even) more succesful if I had given them an oreo cookie after each properly executed assignment? Some people do believe that this is the case: At Masie’s Learning 2008 there will be a keynote from Amy Sutherland in which she will explain how she trained her husband using her experience training exotic animals.

Which learning philosophy do you think that Whiplash’s trainer used? I am pretty sure it wasn’t a social constructivist one!