Gephi, graph exploration and manipulation software Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. “We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say.
Mapping Social Networks The growth of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace has introduced the idea of the 'social graph' into common parlance. the social graph is Watch this short video describing the proof of concept Vizter social network browser visualisation: Vizter explanatory video. How does vizter allow you to identify friends you have in common with other people? How does vizter help the user identify possible communities in the social graph? If you have a Facebook account, there are several tools that you can use to visualise your friends network on there (requires adding the visulisation as a Facebook application). Here are some of the tools that I'm aware of: Touchgraph frinds'n'photos browser;Nexus social graph browser;FriendwheelFacebook Mutual Friend Network Visualization in FlashFriends visulisation in Many Eyes: this application will mine your friends network and produce a data output that will let you visualise your friends network using the Many Eyes network visualisation tool.
Donations Building a fact-based world view Gapminder is a non-profit foundation based in Stockholm. Our goal is to replace devastating myths with a fact-based worldview. Our method is to make data easy to understand. Your contribution will help us in our efforts to explain how the world is changing. Help us achieve a fact-based understanding of the world. Yours sincerely, Hans Rosling, Co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation Make your donation now Select your amount: Personal data is handled in accordance with the Swedish Personal Data Act. mapequation.org Home | The Economist | Human Potential | September 15-16, 2010 | New York Gephi: eye-popping, free graph analysis May 16th, 2010 | By Vic | Category: Mindmapping software, Network visualization The latest addition to Mind-Mapping.Org is a mapping application with a formidable collection of exciting and engaging ways of presenting and visually analysing networks – or as maths buffs call them, graphs. Gephi Gephi is an interactive tool for visualizing and exploring networks and complex graphs. ”This is a software for Exploratory Data Analysis, a paradigm that appeared in the Visual Analytics field of research”, they say. It is free open source software. Its purpose is to help data analysts to uncover patterns and anomalies, or faults during data sourcing. It is used for exploratory data analysis; link analysis; social network analysis; and biological network analysis. It employs metrics to analyse connectedness of nodes (degree – power-law, betweenness, closeness), density, path length, diameter, HITS, modularity, clustering coefficient. Vic
Building a Kick-Ass Social Media Dashboard If you are tasked with building a social media dashboard to track your efforts, look no further than this post. I have built many dashboards over the years and as a personal resolution to making my job easier, I decided to cut to the chase and get to the metrics that matter most. That means cutting out the everyday metrics that litter and cloud up the social media manager’s real success story. Now I am not saying that tracking followers, fans, sentiment, etc. is not important, but those are the vanity metrics that tend to give social media a bad name. These type of metrics are great indicators but they don’t really tie back to your business bottom line: driving revenue. With that being said here are the top metrics that I measure here at Marketo on a weekly basis. Referring Traffic from Social Google Analytics is a fantastic way to measure how much traffic is being referred to your website from the various social channels. Conversions from Social This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Flare | Data Visualization for the Web Foundation uses gaming to inspire rad R&D thinking Could the aggressive strategies used in gaming come to the rescue of the biomedical research community? The Myelin Repair Foundation thinks so. The non-profit medical research organization is hosting a special "gaming event" this fall for R&D experts and biotech players designed to get them to shed their carefully laid plans in favor of forging a breakthrough approach to drug research. "Those who play games have a sense of urgency and abandon when they are engaged in a game scenario," says Jane McGonigal, game designer and producer of the BreakthroughstoCures events. "We have seen these behaviors in corporate strategic game play where there are real stakes. Anyone who's seen gamers performing at their top level know the way they can throw themselves into the action, shedding restraint in favor of a go-for-the-throat plan for victory. Sign up for our FREE newsletter for more news like this sent to your inbox! - here's the Myelin Repair Foundation release
Content Curation Primer Photo by Stuck in Customs What is Content Curation? Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation. People and organizations are now making and sharing media and content all over the social web. Content Curation Provides Value from the Inside Out What does that mean for nonprofits and the people who work for them? For some staff members, content curation can be professional of learning. The biggest challenge to becoming a content curator is getting past the feeling of “content fried” or so much good content and so little time to digest it. The Three S’s of Content Curation: Seek, Sense, Share Content curation is a three-part process: Seek, Sense, and Share. Getting Started
TextArc.org Home The (actual) future of the Big Idea The critics are right: Neal Gabler’s essay in yesterday’s New York Times — the one proclaiming the death of the big idea at the hands of Twitter and Facebook and the Internet in general — is wrong. And we should probably, after giving the thing a slow clap for its bold attempt to transform the Death of the Big Idea into a Big Idea of its own, just dismiss it as so much linkbaitery, and then get on with our (ever more trivial, ever more egotistical, ever more tweet-addled) lives. But the essay’s wrong, actually, in an interesting way. Gabler is making a big assumption: that the Big Idea is Big precisely because it is, actually, big — largely acknowledged, largely apprehended, largely accepted. And ideas’ ability to effect that change — their bigness that gives way to Bigness — comes, obviously and necessarily, by way of the media. So it’s a problem, for Gabler, that Big Media is becoming, steadily, less big. In other words, duh-pocalypse is at hand. And!