Visualising Links

I've been thinking of the links created between the participants in our project.

Left to their own devices, of the one hundred and thirty subjects twelve created links between their blogs (9%). The links were created within two separate nodes, one with eight members the other with four. Our subjects were not that connected.

Within each of the nodes as you might expect the number of other blogs linked to varied. Some of the members of these nodes had no outward links, but were linked to. To my mind these blogs with no outward links were not really contributors to the node, I suppose in biological terms they would be parasitic in nature, not contributing to the knowledge base of the node but drawing from it. Nothing wrong with that but the teacher in me wants to draw everyone in to contribute to the discussion.

What we don't know is whether members of each of the nodes actually read the blogs they were linked to. We might assume that they did but unless they left a pertinent comment or referenced the reading on their own blog we have no proof.

So we should analyse the links together with the content of the blog or comments about the blog.
Counting links is inadequate.........but you knew that didn't you.

I've been accumulating information relating to the visualisation of links and web sites.
Some of it is going to be useful.

Web sites as graphs, these are so attractive, if only I could illustrate our nodes like this.

A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods, find the type you need.

Here's a interesting visualisation but the blog post is more important, its all about the blend between asynchronous and synchronous eLearning.

Vizster by Danah Boyd and Jeffrey Heer. I want to find out more about this. Their visualisations look like my scribbled drawings. Look at their photo gallery. How do we move our bloggers into a community?

On a Hill as DNA?