In this metaphor we pay attention to nodes and the network effects governing flows between them.

The nurse’s course represents a clustering of nurse and trainer nodes (although some may prefer to see the nurse as a link-maker rather than a node). As the nurses interact with the institution of the hospital they develop closer connections with a professional community which they will be absorbed into.

Nurses’ e-portfoilos are a product of several networks.

Depending on your philosophical preference you may define “nurse” as an individual body which has credentials to pass the gate-keeping procedures of the college admissions office, or as a collective actor which is renewed by the annual intake of a new cohort of node-constituents/ link-makers. While successfully completing their studies, the nurses are connected to the flow of pounds sterling by the flat rate maintenance grant, and of words by their receipt of interconnected distance learning materials. The value of the pounds sterling is fixed by international speculative flows of virtual capital between financial centres.

Meanwhile, the cultural power networks of the hospital and the training college partly overlap during the nurse’s work experience period. You may wish to view these as supportive communities, or as sites where power and resistance are held in tension. In this metaphor, power appears in the network as a cluster, which is evidence of a historical accumulation of links.
For example, as well as completing their work duties in the hospital, nurses produce e-portfolios which will be linked to their TMAs and exam results. E-portfolios have a predetermined format established by the learning technologists’ network – but most importantly, they contain links between the isolated cluster of study materials and the cluster of work-related documents closer to the core of the hospital. A “good” portfolio is one that succeeds in making the connections between these two clusters which are deemed most useful to the network as a whole.

Naturally the nurses use a communications network to record their experiences in the hospital, they may also use their brains…which have a similar branching structure of neurons inside them. Interestingly, both the number of people in the world, and the number of internet users, is now approaching the number neurons inside a homo sapiens’ head.

Homo Sapiens may use the same network to support informal and family networks engaged in other types of practice, thus a single nurse is a fractal model of the world as a whole, in terms of biology, ICT and (if Deleuze is to be believed) the structure of her own thought. In their blogs, the nurses each construct meanings which will be comprehensible to each other due to their common participation in a linguistic and media environment which provides them with ideas and models of expression.

It is possible to trace the spread of conceptual categories from the cultural networks into the nurse cohort’s e-portfolios. Researchers may be able to predict the following:

• Which “work experiences” will be recorded and with what frequency according to the relative position of each node.
• The influence of changes in the format of the e-portfolio on its contents.
• The extent to which policy initiatives in the hospital network will facilitate or hinder the flows of bedpans and pillowcases as recorded by the nurse cohort.