So, I’m taking a MOOC in social network analysis. Last week when I signed up and saw that it started in March I thought “whew, in a while then.” Turns out, this week is March. Who knew?
Anyway, the class started yesterday, and I started being behind yesterday. Today I watched the Day One lecture, which had two quiz questions embedded. And I got them both wrong. So this is going really well so far.
Why am I doing this to myself? Well, three reasons. I want to see what one of these things is like from the inside, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by social network graphs, and I’m curious to see if it’ll help me help students evaluate scholarly work. English scholars are a network, so where are the communities within that network? Interdisciplinary work would also be interesting to be able to graph. Seems like I should be able to find especially influential or well-linked nodes within those graphs.
Who knows if I’ll be able to do that kind of thing by the end of one course (probably not), or if I’ll even make it to the end of the course! But I’ll give it a good ol’ college try.