Union of all CCK08 Moodle Forums Social Network

Let me state first as an errata, that I have NOT been given any formal approval to study the CCK08 Moodle forums by Prof. Siemens or Prof. Downes, but was merely informed that they are publicly available. The data, graphs and research plan here is NOT connected nor endorsed by the said professors or their institution. All liability and errors are mine. I am doing this as a private individual and in good faith.

(EDIT: Removed grumbling about research ethics and replaced it with dataset- July 27, 2009)
I've been thinking all night about my ethical dilemma about getting consent from 536 CCK08 Moodle forums participants. I've decided to make an 180 degree turn around. I've decided to release the dataset, because the graphs are totally useless without them. So here they are.

Dataset of anonymized union of all forums in Pajek format (14.85 KB) http://www.mediafire.com/file/m0n3oritnof/cck08allforums_pajek.zip

Here is my justification, the SNA analysis processed two information from the interface of the Moodle forums, which is publicly available. The first is the names of the poster which was used as an id to identify vertices across the forum. The second information is the message id that was autogenerated by Moodle when the poster click reply or post. The body of the message was not touched at all. Gathering the participants' email addresses on top of their names seems to me exacerbating my ethical problem. It's like I need to gather more information about them without their consent so that I can ask their consent to get information that I already have. I have anonymized the Moodle participants' names, and that is all I can do. I can only claim "in the interest of science" as defense i.e. so that discussion about the theory will have hard data to stand on.

Any one who reads this blog and wants me to delete the dataset, just post it in the comment and I'll consider it.

(END of edit-July 27, 2009)

Caveat emptor, this social network of the CCK08 moodle forums can not tell us the whole story of CCK08. There are only 560 registered users. The others probably had their centrality in the blogs, wiki, facebook, twitter etc.

Even some of the isolates and peripheral participants in the moodle network may be in the other networks. I know a peripheral participant in the moodle network who was an active blogger. I myself posted only 7 times in the forum and centered my learning in the wiki resources.

Another source of uncertainty is what I have reported before, the type I error (wrong ties) and type II error (unreported ties).

Let me start with some basic parameters of the social network.

Table 1: Network Parameters of CCK08 Moodle forums

Forums	total initial posts	Total Replies	Total Posts	Participants	% of total unique actors (n =537)
1 (Introduction)	494	798	1292	501	93.3
2 (General)	122	1283	1405	165	30.73
3 (forum 1)	11	301	312	83	15.46
4 (forum 2)	25	291	316	61	11.36
5 (forum 3)	26	427	453	48	8.94
6 (forum 4)	7	131	138	28	5.21
7 (forum 5)	19	252	271	42	7.82
8 (forum 6)	16	96	112	30	5.59
9 (forum 7)	15	117	132	25	4.66
10 (forum 8)	17	244	261	85	15.83
11 (forum 9)	13	133	146	28	5.21
12 (forum 10)	11	77	88	24	4.47
13 (forum 11)	10	143	153	35	6.52
14 (forum 12)	14	105	119	29	5.4
grand total	800	4398	5198	537 (unique actors)
				560 (registered users)

Figure 1: Frequency of initial posts in the forums


Figure 2: Frequency of total replies in the forums


Figure 3: Frequency of total posts in the forums


Figure 4: Frequency of participants in the forums

All line graphs were generated with R.


CCK08 Moodle Forums Social Network

Dataset: http://www.mediafire.com/file/m0n3oritnof/cck08allforums_pajek.zip

Pajek renders (fruchterman reingold 2D layout)

Figure 5: Union of all forums without tie strength


Figure 6: Union of all forums without tie strength and frequency of posts as vector (size of vertices)


Figure 7: Union of forums with tie stregth

Figure 8: Union of forums with tie strengths and frequency of posts as vector (size of vertices)

Netdraw Renders (spring embeddeding layout)


Figure 9: No tie strength


Figure 10: With tie strength

Figure 11: Scale 1:1 of total posts attribute represented as sizes of nodes

Figure 12: Figure 11: Scaled to minimum size 4:maximum size 50 of total posts attribute represented as sizes of nodes

One way to connect the isolates in the moodle network with the bloggers is to look at the moodle activity logs (which is only available to the site admin), and probably to mine it with Weka. Then find out which of the core moodle participants they are following. Afterwards compare the semantic network of their blogs with the semantic networks of the said participants.

An interested researcher may do semantic network analysis of the CCK08 Moodle core participants posts probably with Kathleen Carley's Automap or Carter Butts' The metamatrix package for organizational analysis, a package for R.

(Edited July 27, 2009)
Despite the research ethics issue and my aching clicking arm, eyes and back, I've learned a lot from this attempt. I'll probably use the method I've learned here in a dataset where I have taken all necessary ethical requirements. All in all it was fun.
(Edited July 27, 2009)

References:

Borgatti, S. Netdraw [Software]. Available at http://www.analytictech.com/Netdraw/netdraw.htm.

R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Development Core Team. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria, 2009,ISBN 3-900051-07-0}, http://www.R-project.org.

V. Batagelj, A. Mrvar: Pajek - Program for Large Network Analysis. Home page
http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/.