An interactive exploration of the seven essential concepts that every person living in the 21st century should understand about networks — developed collaboratively by over 30 network science researchers, educators, teachers and students, and now available in 20 languages worldwide.
Based on Network Literacy: Essential Concepts and Core Ideas (Cramer, Porter, Sayama, Sheetz & Uzzo, 2015, NetSciEd) · CC BY-SA 4.0
As our world becomes increasingly connected through the use of networks that allow instantaneous communication and the spread of information, the degree of people's understanding of how these networks work will play a major role in determining how much society will benefit from this heightened connectivity.
A networked society requires network literacy: basic knowledge about how networks can be used as a tool for discovery and decision-making, and about both their potential benefits and pitfalls, made accessible for all people living in today's networked world. Because even young children interact with networks all day, every day, network literacy should begin at a young age and be reflected throughout teaching practice in a cross-disciplinary manner.
Large nodes are Essential Concepts (the principles). Smaller nodes are the core ideas that support each principle. Click a concept to highlight its cluster. Double-click to reset. Drag to rearrange.
Each essential concept is a principle. Click any card to expand the core ideas that support it.
The Network Literacy guide has been translated by network scientists around the world. Click a dot on the map or a language below to access each version.
Network Literacy sits within a broader family of domain-specific literacies — ocean, earth, climate, data, systems — that converge through shared patterns toward understanding how complex systems work. Networks are one of the enduring patterns identified by Len Troncale in his Systems Process Theory: a fundamental structural pattern common to all systems.
See also: systems.coexplorer.org explores Nature's Enduring Patterns as a path to Systems Literacy, including thinker pages with knowledge graphs for Troncale, von Bertalanffy, and Alexander. The companion site cybernetics.coexplorer.org hosts thinker pages for Ashby, Beer, Pask, Turing, Spencer-Brown, and Whitehead.