Even then, students have all kinds of unexplained Gephi problems (e.g., the visualization pane simply doesn’t work on some Macs). Luckily, there are fixes but they often involve Mac esoterica (e.g., Apple support does weird things in Safari, but not Chrome). The issue with Gephi is that it is highly sensitive to OS version.
Then one can try Gephi, which is a whole ball of wax. Even when it does work, NodeXL gets stuck downloading data from some student accounts. And lots of people have Windows 8 and they have endless installation problems. That works but… Windows 8 is highly allergic to NodeXL. But it suddenly disappeared! One solution is to use the Facebook importer in NodeXL. I have been using NetVizz, an app inside Facebook, to extract network data. I have an undergrad class where the first major assignment is to download one’s Facebook network and analyze it. Question for readers who teach networks: What software should I use for low tech undergrads? So far, I am having some real challenges…