I just returned from Durham, North Carolina where I was at the Harambee 2010 Social Networks for Educators workshop.* I was there wearing two hats: 1) as someone who is qualified to talk about teaching a social networks course (using this text) and  2) as a teacher interested in using social networks to get high school students interested in social networks.** There were about 40 other academics there interested in using social networks in education, from all sorts of disciplines: computer science, communications, sociology, and education mostly.  The goal of the conference was to assist educators in 1) developing new courses using social networks, 2) finding ways to implement social networks into existing courses and 3) help students develop better critical thinking skills.

I came into the conference with the following thought: the teaching of social networks can be divided into a simplex like below, where a class is somewhere along the boundary.  This leads to classes which are a combination of sociology, mathematics and engineering.  The study of social networks is a discipline in itself and each field has its own approach.

In retrospect, I was thinking too narrowly.  Rather than being a discipline in itself, social networks are a great pedagogical tool to reach some other learning goal. For example, for students early in their CS education, social networks make a great introduction to algorithmic and game theoretic thinking. For sociology students, social networks are a great introduction into statistical analysis and complex systems.  Rather than teaching social networks as an end in itself, there are much broader goals that can be accomplished.  This is definitely a skill I can take into a K-12 classroom in the fall; I conjecture that high school students certainly know about social networks (i.e. Facebook) and are vaguely familiar with the concept of network.  This can be leveraged with good examples to help students develop critical thinking skills: many things can be modeled as networks: economies, ecologies, supply chains, etc.  Recognizing networks is a skill that every person in our modern society should have, they’re so pervasive.

A couple random highlights of the conference:

Ben Shneiderman’s inspirational talk about how the future of CS is modeling computational AND human behavior.  His NodeXL project is really impressive and would work great for an introductory networks class.

Jon Kleinberg‘s keynote talk at the end of the conference.  He concisely summarized what I was trying to say the day before, when I spoke about teaching a course using his book.  It was nice to hear another CS theorist talk at the conference, I felt a little lonely in CS theory-land at times.

That summarizes my Harambee adventure this year. Hopefully, next year, I’ll get invited back to talk about my experience using social networks to encourage high school students.

* – The conference was sponsored by the NSF CNS-0722288. Thanks NSF!

** – I am a NSF GK-12 Fellow, so I will be spending my fall in the classroom with a teacher! Thanks again NSF!