Social Capital has been a termed explored and pursued by two of my posse members, Heather and Rick. They both talk about it quite a bit. I may be butchering the definition so I hope they forgive me if I miss the purest definition or better yet, add to the conversation with some insights.
To me, social capital, or perhaps there’s a better term, is a quantifiable measure of contributions to one’s social network. So a few things have arose as of late that sparks an interest in this for me.
- Will’s recent post on Pocket Texting and the idea of “knowledge power” points. We have seen the use of ratings on sites like experts-exchange and other sites where the usefulness of one’s answers ranks them higher and in some cases produces economic benefits.
- Tweeterboard. I hadn’t even heard of this until this tweet a few days ago. So for the past few days I’ve tried to figure out how in the world this works and what’s the significance? First of all it appears to be a random sampling of twitter so that needs to be considered but the idea is basically a combination of quantity, shared links and exchanges with others.
They’re calculated using some algorithmic mojo that resembles the link analysis algorithms used by search engines. Your reputation points are based on the conversations you’ve had over the last 28 days, which means your score can jump around a lot.
- A conversation I had with Ewan Mcintosh about a company, (maybe Ewan can add the link) that is developing their own algorithm that measures social capital within their business. He mentioned things like identifying writing and work that has been reused or tagged several times and looking at the usefulness, sharing,commenting of one’s work inside a company. Ewan’s thinking about how this might be used to measure the work and value of Scotland’s student bloggers.
- My continued pursuit of a higher commpost rating.
So while tools like Technorati provide some degree of measure, there’s so much more than comprises social capital. How might we assess, our total online portfolio? The fact that many are involved in dozens of communities from flickr, youtube,facebook,blogs,wikis, the whole sha-bang would require some fancy mathematical calculations. I’m guessing it would include things like: the number of communities you’re actively involved with (which means “active” must be defined) numbers of tagged pieces of content by others, number of other’s work you’ve remixed, comments, IM’s…the list goes on.
Teachers are excited when I show them simple things like the history feature of wikis that track student work. The sophistication of some of these tools to measure the depth of conversations and contributions seems to be increasing. While in many jurisdictions the importance of standardized testing seems to preclude many discussions around the value of social capital I think there is some real ripeness for some of our schools to utilize tools that could measure social capital. I’m guessing that so would many businesses. Not that that is the ultimate goal but like Will watches his gas gauge on his Prius perhaps our kids could get excited about watching their social capital points rise. Or does that miss the point totally? I’m just wondering.
Technorati Tags: willrichardson, heatherross, rickschweir, edtechposse, twitter, ewanmcintosh
Powered by ScribeFire.
Dean,
I think you’d be very interested in Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the book, he imagines an entire economy built on social capital, which he calls whuffie. It’s a good read, and a well developed vision of what social capital might look like.
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
Yet another posse member (me) has studied social capital quite a bit. Here’s a diagram I put together for my dissertation.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035553780@N01/2107941334/
Basically, from a literature review, I look at the many characteristics of social capital (many identified in Schwier’s work) and then project social capital theory as an excellent way to understand nebulous/unpredictable occurrences in the network. This fits in well with what you are saying, by measuring social capital you may be able to predict phenomenon … and of course, by being strategic, you can see great changes in the organization.
On the other side of things, I’m also a bit nervous about the term in certain contexts … “capital” is not always the greatest way of thinking about human relationships and networks … especially if it gets into the wrong hands. The term can be used to exploit networks as much as it can be used to help us understand and comprehend social relationships.
[...] Original post by shareski@gmail.com (Dean Shareski) [...]
I’ve been sort of following this through twitter. I’ve been trying to develop a network and I’m following quality people. I’m learning so much by following the links that they post. I worry about these quality people ‘dropping’ me because it takes time for one to start contributing quality stuff (for the lack of a better word) to the network. When I have a question that the network could help me with, will they be there? It takes time for digital immigrants (I’m not sure I’m that, I think I’m more like a digital illegal alien!) to learn their way around and to find quality things to add to the network. I guess, I’m also afraid that my Social Capital is in the red! If the predictions about this are even just a bit accurate, I’m going to be in trouble.
I should have called this the wiki post as I knew others would add much more.
Bud,
Thanks for that, I’ll pick it up.
Alec,
You dropped off the podcast the other night when this came up. I should have known you’d have some insight.
Erin,
I’ve been watching you and you’ll be well on your way to getting in the black soon enough.
Dean,
A few quick comments. First, great post. I’m always happy to see people get interested in the concept of social capital. I think that measuring social capital is very difficult. You can look at student blogs and see what they are writing about and who’s commenting, linking, etc., but you miss out on the ways the students are communicating with each other outside of the blogs or even outside of cyberspace / cell phones and other things that we think of as newer technology. What about the conversations in the hallways or at a team practice, etc.?
There are a number of great resources out there if you want to read more about social capital including the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam http://www.amazon.ca/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197560168&sr=8-1
You may just want to start with the Wikipedia entry on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
I wonder, is social capital also built through a “blog awards” process?
[...] have to make sure I re-read his writing as I develop my role. Dean had a blog post recently about social capital, and Heather writes extensively about social capital. Their ideas will also inform what I [...]