I love evidence that confirms one or more of my prejudices. Just came across a very intersting little study of social networking habits on Facebook that confirms my prejudice that the more things change the more they remain the same. I don’t believe that people’s lives are being radically changed by ICT. Our basic habits remain much the same but we do things in different ways. So here is the story I came across.

A sociologist called Dunbar produced a hypothesist years ago that people can only manage a network of about 150 people. That is what their brain allows. So ancient villages and Roman military units and lots of other organisations are about this size. Within this network people communicate intimately with a quite small number of people. So, The Economist magazine asked the in-house sociologist at Facebook to crunch some numbers of Facebook members, and in brief he found that the average number of friends on Facebook is 120, which is consisten with Dunbar’s 150. And, went on to say,

“… an average man—one with 120 friends [in Facebook] —generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.”

So this bit of research seems to suggest that while members of Facebook apparently are networking on a huge scale, they are actually interacting with a handfull of people, which is what people have been going for a very long time. Facebook and other social networking sites are making it easy to newtork with a wider group of people that normal, but people still only have real interactions with a similar number of people, and their intimate relation ships remain much the same. You can get the full, but quite short, story at The Economist, here. Of course Facebook allows you to network with people that are dispersed geographically.

The article suggests that much of the communication that is new in social networking (and blogging more so) is broadcasting rather than networking. They are broadcasting their views and information but there are a modest number of responses, mainly from a handful of people.

So I am a bit skeptical about the notion of everyone needing to have a PLN (Personal Learning Network), even though I have been working on several projects to support this concept. My skepticism is about whether most people want to network with more than a small group of people that they know personally. This does not contradict what Graham has said about his experience. The key work is ‘most’. How many people to you want to interact with?

I wrote a post on my blog this weekend.

Nothing too unusual about that – for me. I also attended a Professional Development day earlier in the week along with about 140 other educators from at least four local schools. We were there attending a great day with Mark Treadwell, traveling scholar, author and education consultant for the New Zealand education system. Mark is an acknowledged expert in the field of 21st Century Learning, brain research and curriculum design and therefore had a lot to offer us regular educators sitting there soaking in his message. He challenged us with plenty of thought provoking information – and many people were ready to apply his words to their practice, quoting his work as a form of pedagogical gospel.

Now I really, really liked what Treadwell had to say. In fact, it was the second time I’ve heard him speak. But unlike the vast, vast majority of his Monday audience, I don’t have to accept his words as total, unchangeable gospel just because he is in the well-known role of expert. Because I am an online educator, because I am connected, I am “Googleable”, because I have a PLN (Professional/Personal Learning Network) I have advantages over many of my colleagues. I can pose half formed thoughts around one of his propositions in written form, share them in a public forum (like this blog) and gain valuable pushback from colleagues all around the world. I get to filter my initial ideas back through my network to moderate, balance and mould an emerging viewpoint that may differ to the advice offered by the expert.

I’m not discounting the role of the expert. We need them. But through the use of a PLN, a self selected collection of colleagues in various systems, sectors, countries, stages of career using a selection of social media tools (blogs, wikis, twitter, podcasts, videos, bookmarking) can offer me greater counsel in tapping into the collective wisdom of many, many experts. After all, we all have expertise. and we have something that many experts don’t have (or only have a second hand experience of) and that is grassroots experience. That is the grey area where the expert’s boundaries intersect with our experience. It is true that we need critical skills to make this work in the “publish then filter” era but technology can be utilised knowingly to filter any ideas around education and learning.

No one person holds the key to learning success – not any more and for me, that is the true shift of the new Internet Based Education Paradigm that Mark referred to on Monday.

Image: Sue Waters http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/files/2008/12/plntool.jpg