Thanks Elizabeth will certainly look at  Community of Inquiry framework/theory as an impportant addition to any conceptual framework.

In terms of the second article sadly that plug in that they custom created is no longer used and having contacted the researched thaey have all log since moved on and are polite but largely unresponsive.

As mentioned elsewhere I will look at Forum Graph Module (VERY surprised at how few downloads and sites have used it)

SNAPP is now also defunct - not sure why - perhaps another one man project

Had some discussions with NodeXL but that is more aimed at wide social networks  and Im unclear how to get any help trying to apply it to Moodle

ViMoodle is yet another analysis tool that has come and long gone and is defunct and no longer available or compatible.

UCINET is another tool which is for Windows and is a software package for the analysis of social network data. It was developed by Lin Freeman, Martin Everett and Steve Borgatti. It comes with the NetDraw network visualization tool but again I need to find expertise to see whether at all this can be used with Moodle (also irritatingly it is for PC)

eMUSE seemed like a one of proprietary research tool that hasnt been made available

Then there is the TUT LA tool developed at the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory (IISLab) at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT). The tool is used to analyse students’ activity from automatically recorded user log data and to build interactive visualisations. They provide valuable insights into the learning process and participation of students in a course offered to teachers and students. But again I need to see if that is anything more than a glorified "what/where/when" log analysis tool or wether ti can crack the challenge of RELATIONSHIPS and learner-learner-teacher interactions.

So maybe Im just left with Moodle forum graph?

But given how few have used it - I wonder to what extend the Moodle community is really interested  in social network analysis?

As a Moodle HQ person what is Martin Dougiamas' view on this as a big fan of social constructivism?

I'd love to know. Also I confess it is hard to get a plain summary of what moodle is doing with analytics from that forum. There is a huge amount of activity - is there an exec report and do you know if any of it rekates to the key challenge of social and relational analysis within moodle? (ie moving away form the simplistic "who looked at what resource and when" system in place?

keen to hear your thoughts?

Dom