“Six Degrees of Separation” Assignment

Wikipedia Quest

“Six degrees of separation is the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of “a friend to a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.” – Wikipedia (oxfordmathcenter.com)

“Karinthy [often regarded as the originator the idea of Six Degrees of Separation] believed that the modern world [1929] was ‘shrinking’ due to this ever-increasing connectedness of human beings. He posited that despite great physical distances between the globe’s individuals, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance smaller.”- Wikipedia (academic.edu)

Purpose:

While “social networks” may appear to be a 21st century phenomenon with the accessibility of the internet and more availability of complimentary hardware, the idea of “six degrees of separation” was created due to the creation of early 20th century technologies. While we (people) are more linked, so are the ideas, resources, and concepts that are all around us. The world continues to “shrink,” but it is important that we use these innovations to better understand the world. One of the most utilized and democratic resources available to us to link us to the wold and knowledge is Wikipedia.

One of its greatest strengths is that it has the ability to shape one’s curiosity, not just create answers for to squash it. But it can’t be the END to our search, but used as a tool BEGIN a search. The purpose of this assignment is to better use Wikipedia as a source to create curiosity.

Assignment:

  1. Each student is to start with one vocabulary word from a specific unit or chapter (assigned by me) and use the hyperlinks to explore five more ideas/concepts (six in all) by choosing a new word on each consecutive page.
  2. For each word/idea (there should be six of these), students must record the following:
  3. THE WORD…duh
  4. A general definition/explanation
  5. A piece of information on the Wiki page that you believe to be interesting (quote and what makes it so interesting)
  6. One External Link that might be an interesting follow up.
  7. Significance
  8. Citations for b-c (if available)
  1. Example (Format):

Word 1: Six degrees of separation

Definition 1: “Six degrees of separation is the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of “a friend to a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.” – Wikipedia (oxfordmathcenter.com)

Idea of interest 1:

“Bakhshandehet al.[20] have addressed the search problem of identifying the degree of separation between two users in social networks such as Twitter. They have introduced new search techniques to provide optimal or near optimal solutions. The experiments are performed using Twitter, and they show an improvement of several orders of magnitude over greedy approaches. Their optimal algorithm finds an average degree of separation of 3.43 between two random Twitter users, requiring an average of only 67 requests for information over the Internet to Twitter. A near-optimal solution of length 3.88 can be found by making an average of 13.3 requests.” (Reza Bakhshandeh, Mehdi Samadi, ZohrehAzimifar, Jonathan Schaeffer, "Degrees of Separation in Social Networks", Fourth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 2011)

I find this to be incredibly interesting because it is a physical representation of a theory. It is one thing for us to create theories, but for us to find a way to make it mathematically measurable is impressive (prove it!). Clearly, social networks have shrunk the world, but to create an algorithm that actually explains how is awesome! I also find the data about Twitter crazy…for the most part, people on Twitter are somewhere between 3.43 and 3.88 people apart! The world is really small.

External Link:

Six Degrees Campaign, a climate justice campaign initiated by Friends of the Earth Brisbane based on the principles of small world theory.

Significance:

Before we can make the most of a “shrinking” world, we need to recognize it, and try to find a way to understand it. While the “Twitter data” clearly demonstrates that six degrees is now mathematically outdated, it is a concept that we can both visualize and understand. In this increasingly small world, economics (trade in particular), politics, and society are changing with it, and it is often known as globalization. As we continue to develop as a race (people) and nations, we have to find a way to share this small world.

Word 2: Social Networks (continue…)

Depending on the size of the concept, the table of contents should help speed up research by showing what topics and creating a hyperlink.

Again, while doing research, you may want to consider “See also” to help give you other ideas to further your research and give you other directions. Very often, I will say that Wikipedia is a resource, but not a source. “References” will link you to acceptable source material.

Again, external links should point you towards new references and sources to help you explore the material and subject matter.