Image source: Network Science: From the Web to Human DiseasesI started my involvement posting in Cyberspace with the Development Gateway, where for some years I have served as an editor of the facets of the DG portal serving several communities:
I also served as an editor for a Monitoring and Evaluation Community but it is no longer supported by the DG Foundation. I also post resources on a number of other community facets. The community facets of the DG had more than 67,000 visits over the last month, and I have probably contributed something like 20,000 postings of online resources, news, events, and even have written a fair number of short articles for DG highlights. Of course there are other editors and many other people posting information on the DG portal.
Early on, it occurred to me that blogging was an emerging means of networking and that I should try to create a blog. I created Thoughts About K4D at the end of 2002, and have been posting to it ever since. I find I have an archive of more than 4,000 postings, and the blog gets about 100 visits a day. Overall there have been more than 125,000 visits.
In 2004 I joined the Board of Directors of Americans for UNESCO and began to take a stronger interest in UNESCO. Since I was following UNESCO events and learning about its programs I thought I would share the information. I was especially hopeful that the other participants in Americans for UNESCO and the members of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO would find it interesting and useful. I work with two blogs:
- UNESCO in the Spotlight: Science and Communications and
- UNESCO In the Spotlight: Education and Culture
For the last three years I have taught a course titled UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century at George Washington University. The University makes the Blackboard Academic Suite available for students and faculty for each class, and I my students and I have used it extensively. This semester, for example, I have posted materials related to each week's class on the platform and my students have accessed the materials an average of 55 times per person. I have also been building an online bibliography on UNESCO which serves my students and others:
http://delicious.com/unescobibliographywhich has been viewed about 400 times since it was created. (I started another social bookmarking site related to the K4D blog which I have pretty much stopped adding to, which has been visited something over 100 times).
More recently I have experimented with LinkedIN and Facebook. I have been made the manager of the UNESCO Group on LinkedIN, which currently has 270 members and has been growing at 20 to 30 new members a week. That is a fairly active group, at least with the automated posting of news from various feeds.
Most recently I have been tweeting on two Twitter sites:
- amunesco (for Americans for UNESCO) and
- stconsultant (for my K4D blog and interests.
Of course, as a number of studies have postulated, the World Wide Web is the infrastructure on which a huge network has been created. While the studies of these networks have established interesting properties, the structures are among websites and webpages. The new social networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) are networking people. LinkedIn tells me that I have 158 connections, with indirect links to more than 1.6 million more.
I am an old guy, and not as networked as students seem to be these days, but modern networking connectivity seems really huge even to me. The Internet made a world of information available, and search engines made it possible to find useful information in that wealth of data. It also made email possible, which made it possible to communicate with people you know conveniently over distance. But social networking makes it possible to communicate with people you don't know when you have a reason to do so. Amazing!!
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