People's weak ties are in between absent and strong ties. These are ties between people that know each other, but not particularly well. In real-world terms, these are the people that you interact with once a month, whom you probably do not see very often.
In small-world networks, we see sparse connections between communities. Each community experiences a high degree of clustering, or equivalently, the graph overall has a high level of mod. We might assume that the world without weak ties, there would not be any flow going between the various communities.
To sum up, Hoffman Resource Centre have a strong membership system, which includes strong ties and weak ties; if we can use these weak tie to share knowledge, the member of Hoffman Resource Centre may have a efficient way to navigate and acquire professional knowledge. Weak ties may borden people's boundaries to get access to heterogeneous information.
How people access knowledge.
interview & Experiment
After our literature review, we made there experience to observe how people seek for knowledge through their social network.
Experiment 1
We gave them two tasks in which they need to seek for answer through asking people instead of online searching.
Task One:
Get the answer to "At what rate should cardiac compressions be performed in adults?"
Task Two:
Get the meaning of this sentence which combines different words from three languages
What we find
1. Most of our participant chose a person to ask usually base on three dimension: Expertness; knowledgeable; Familiarity.
2. Individual pattern for seeking information is solidified.
Reflection
1. People lack motivation for these tasks.
2. Some online behaviors of our task participants are hard to observe.
Experiment 2
In order to observe how people spread information in the real life, we held a game in our school canteen that let our volunteers to spread a text "There are some free food" to a stranger. We also payed attention to people's gesture as well as behaviour when they talking with strangers.
Game Rule:
How people react?
What we find
1. Non-verbal communication, such as physical behaviour and facial expression pay an important role in communication.
2. Environment helps to speed up the information spreading. People may feel relax when they're in a place that they familiar with.
Reflection
1. This experiment is a one direction information sharing and it against a social network-forming.
2. It only focus on reaching out strangers.
Experiment 3
In order to build up a simulative social network, we designed a game that let our participants to get a word from some fragmentised information. This game combined strong and weak ties, hubs theories and constructed a social network for our participant.
In the beginning, we told them different part of the whole word and then let them guess the whole word by communicating with others.
How people react?
What we find
The factors drive knowledge seeking behaviour:
1.Drive by atmosphere ( Feel awkward at first but when everyone emerged into the communication )
2.Drive by familiarity ( People tend to talk with someone they familiar with )
3.Driven by relative accessibility ( People tend to talk with others who sit near them)
In conclusion, we found that the way people access to knowledge is limited through three experiment. Expanding people's social network might be an opportunity point for us.