There's been lots of UK media coverage over the weekend of a Microsoft research study that used traffic on Microsoft's Instant Messenger (IM) to investigate global communication (See articles in the Guardian, Telegraph, and BBC.)

The study captured anonymised data from June 2006 - specifically properties of 30 billion IM conversations (not messages, conversations!) among 240 million people. Of interest to the media is the global investigation of 'six degrees of separation' - the idea that everyone is just six steps away from anyone else. In fact, the researchers found that the average separation among IM users was 6.6, or seven in terms of whole people!

The original study was published in June 2007 - which perhaps says something about the degrees of separation of journalists from up to date research.

Even though those with (reported) ages in the 15-35 age group are strongly overrepresented, there are other findings that are interesting in terms age and gender.
For example, a series of hot and cold graphs plotted against age, show that younger users have more conversations made of up more quickly generated messages, but they are shorter than older users who tend to send more messages per conversation. In terms of gender, the researchers note that "cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender".

Leskovec, J., & Horvitz, E. (2007). Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network.

Labels: digitalnatives, networks, researchmethods, sms

Google have announced their open social networking platform will enable developers to create applications that work across different networking sites that have joined forces with OpenSocial (already including LinkedIn, Ning and Friendster). This should streamline development processes, meaning that applications are compatible across sites. See ZDNet.com for some more detailed analysis of the implications.

Labels: internet, IT, networks, online, web2.0

The Guardian reports that MySpace and Skype have joined forces to allow MySpace users to chat to each other for free within the social networking space using Skype VoIP technology.

The development has been hailed as 'The start of a convergence of social networking and communications applications' by Tim O'Reilly. It will afford users with another alternative communication channel, making the social networking environment an increasingly rich communicative tool.

Labels: digitalnatives, internet, IT, networks, online, web2.0

The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills have announced £3.9 million in funding to support the Technology Exemplar Network jointly led by Becta and LSC.

This inititative will aim to create a national support network to enable those who have successfully embedded ICT in their teaching and learning to share their experience with other practitioners and thus encourage use of learner-focused technology in education.

Read more at PublicTechnology.net

Labels: education, elearning, IT, networks, online, practitioners

The Health Protection Agency have announced a new strudy investigating the effects of wireless networks on our health. Although they say that they "have good scientific reasons to expect the results to be re-assuring", the empahsis of the study seems to be looking at patterns of use, and quantifying actual levels of exposure.

Read more at PublicTechnology.net .

Labels: digitalnatives, education, health, internet, IT, networks

This recently published article reports on research which says that university applicants expect unrestricted access to internet. While this is unsuprising as most university applicants will already use the internet in their everyday life, it does raise questions for institutions who want to maintain a degree of control over their networks, and how to reach an acceptable compromise between learner expectations of freedom of use and safety/security of the network.

Labels: digitalnatives, freedom, HE, internet, IT, learnerexpectations, networks, security