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Socialization is one of the benefits of traditional education often pointed out by its proponents. A small children, students begin leaving their homes everyday to go be with others of the same general age and stage of social development. They learn such important lessons as how to play together and, hopefully, how to make decisions as a group. When they reach eighteen, most of them leave home for good and attend a more grown-up version of the same educational model and continue their socialization development via classes, organizations, and internships. People generally state that this process of learning with others and growing comfortable in society is an important thing — it keeps people from becoming isolated and unproductive.

Naturally , some argue that the role of socialization in traditional education models is overstated at best. Home schooling advocates, for example, point to the often impersonal and negative aspects of the socialization provided by both public and private schools. Others argue that the educational system in the U.S. has deteriorated over recent decades and no longer offers the stable modeling of proper socialization it once provided.

These arguments over socialization generally deteriorate into a shouting match of subjective abstractions based on weak anecdotal evidence. The reason is that it is most difficult to “quantify” the socialization experiences of students in the classroom (traditional or non-traditional). If a person had a good experience attending public schools, for example, he or she tends to support the system. If the experience was negative, the system is opposed.

The discussions regarding socialization have been going one for decades, but I became mindful of them again in recent months as I worked on a white paper regarding environmental scanning in online education. Environmental scanning is what teachers do almost unconsciously in the traditional classroom — checking the energy level of students, the temperature and physical arrangements of the desks, etc. While my own system of “reading” students and “checking out” the classroom has evolved over twenty-one years into a semi-accurate system, it is not something that can really be captures or assessed with any real effectiveness.

One of my assertions in that paper is that this thing that teachers do subjectively and with mixed results in the traditional, brick and mortar classroom, could be identified, quantified, and studied for improvement easily on line. Precisely because it is possible to capture student activity, interest, and discomfort using quantitative statistics, teachers can study, learn from their mistakes, and improve the learning experience rather quickly.

The same thing is true when it comes to socialization. When working online, it is much easier to take “snapshots” of social interaction and outcomes, as well as track dynamic interactions. In short, we have tools available that allow us to speak rather definitively about student experiences and socialization — positive and negative — and build effective models for improving our learning architectures on the Web.

There are a number of tools available that present excellent study opportunities regarding social networks and knowledge acquisition among students. One of the most promising products is Inflow, a product that performs network analysis and network visualization for organizations a project groups. It specializes in presenting, visually, knowledge centers in groups of people, and draws common social paths that people take to obtain needed information. Other products include Antarctica’s Visual Net, and the open source solution NetVis. Both Steven Johnson and Roland Piquepaille have good articles on this technology trend.

The key now is to take these data mining tools and extend their functionality so that it integrates well with course management systems. It won’t take long and it will happen. And what that means is that we can have substantive and accurate discussions about the impact of our methodologies on students, and about how to make learning experiences online a pleasant and effective as possible.