Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime. Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience. Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Learning now occurs in a variety of ways – through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks. Learning is a continual process, lasting for a lifetime. Learning and work related activities are no longer separate. In many situations, they are the same. Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking. The organization and the individual are both learning organisms. Increased attention to knowledge management highlights the need for a theory that attempts to explain the link between individual and organizational learning. Many of the processes previously handled by learning theories (especially in cognitive information processing) can now be off-loaded to, or supported by, technology. Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed)

Class Schedule with Weekly Readings and Activities

art III introduced two of these theoretical areas (social capital and diffusion of innovation), but there are many others. These others include network exchange theory (Blau, 1964; Cook, Emerson, Gilmore, & Yamagishi, 1983), which focuses on how a network's structure influences whom in the network emerges as powerful, and social influence theory (e.g., Friedkin, 1998), which considers how actors influence one another's thoughts.

ERGMs are the primary building blocks of statistically testing network structural effects. Increasingly, researchers are not only interested in describing an ego or complete network but rather in whether an observed network property is significant. ERGMs [Page 179]generate (random) networks derived from features of the observed network, which provide a way to compare the observed and simulated networks. Statistical analysis is then conducted to test whether the ties in the simulated network match those generated by the simulations.

definition(s) of the neighborhood

How ego-centric networks could be applied to your research projects?

top-down

betweenness centrality

First, you identify the main structural properties of a network, including those related to its size, density, and connectivity.

P-O-L-C

Social capital becomes synonymous with trust, cohesion, and norms. Therefore, formulating causal propositions becomes difficult.

single relationship among actors: friendship, support, advice, and the like

The assumption here is that one student's behavior is independent of any other's. Social network analysis directly confronts this assumption.

Groups

It is a comprehensive paradigmatic way of taking social structure seriously by studying directly how patterns of ties allocate resources in a social system”

Since stronger friendships imply greater vulnerability to influence, students are likely influenced more by friends who are in the same track than by those in different tracks (Hallinan & Sorenson, 1985). Such social influences have obvious consequences for individual student outcomes.