Social Media | LSE Eden Centre Learning Technology Team

Exploring Social Media as data sources for research

Last Wednesday, CLT ran a workshop on Exploring Social Media as data sources for research as part of our NetworkEd series.

There was an excellent turnout of around 35 academics and PhD students from across the LSE’s departments attending, which shows that there is real interest in developing effective research methods to analyse the wealth of data social media can provide.

Some of the tools we explored can be found here. We got the ball rolling by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using social media data for research, which Jane presented below:

July 1st, 2013|Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, Research Skills, Social Media|Comments Off|

What CLT (can) do for you: Social Media

CLT – what we do for you…
An occasional series about stuff we support and promote & which we think you should know more about. Today’s post is about Social Media.

Social Media
‘Social media’ is a generic term that describes all those online applications you use to communicate, share and collaborate with others for variety of reasons, networking, fun, politics and of course learning. Blogs, social networking sites (eg facebook), twitter, wikis (eg Wikipedia), flickr – all these are social media. For a comprehensive guide, check out the JISC InfoNet guide on social software.
CLT have been promoting and supporting the use of social media in education for quite some time and especially in the last two years LSE academics have really started to embrace them. Blogging and twitter have become particularly popular, as their potential for making connections in learning, teaching and research has become more apparent. In our CLT NetworkED seminar series last year, Patrick Dunleavy indeed made a great case for academic blogging as part of a new digital revolution in the academic publishing world. Facebook groups are used by PhD students as a platform to share information and academic tips across the disciplines. Moodle wikis are used to facilitate collaborative writing to great effect. The new director Craig Calhoun has an established twitter presence and recently encouraged anyone out there to ask him questions via twitter (#askthedirector) which he answered in real time at a particular hour at the beginning of term. And if you still need convincing that twitter can (i.e. most emphatically not must!) have a place in academia, have a quick read of the LSE guide to twitter.

If you’re planning an academic conference or event, however small or big, you should really consider creating a hashtag so that the wider community can participate: online backchannels are now as important as face2face meetings. And if you’re not sure about which social media are right for you – teaching, networking, learning or research – then you should get in touch with us! Drop us a line, drop in on us, book on one of our training courses: we’ve been supporting the use of social media for a long time!

Our workshops change over the years of course – recently we have started to concentrate more on how to write effectively for the web and moved away from the more step by step learning of how to create and manage blogs. We can also tailor workshops to particular departments’ or groups’ needs. Get in touch if this is something that interests you.

Timeline:

2005	CLT start running blogs via wordpress
2006	CLT host first externally facing blog for Charlie Beckett, blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis
2007	Libraries & Social Software in Education (LASSIE) project, project blog still going strong and maintained by CLT’s Jane Secker
2008	Digital Literacy workshop programme, offering workshops on blogging, social bookmarking, twitter, using rich media (youTube, flickr etc) in teaching…
2010	set up the lse.ac.uk yammer domain – a sort of corporate ‘walled’ twitter application for all LSE account holders.
2011	Workshops on social referencing tools: CiteULike, Zotero, Mendeley
2011	#LSEnetED: CLT seminar series NetworkED: Technology in Education launched with funding from the LSE Annual Fund.

Update: Conor Gearty’s Reflections on ‘new media’ , published yesterday (12/11/12), is a measured and well-informed discussion of the pros and cons of academics’ (esp. Public Lawyers) use of twitter and blogging.

November 12th, 2012|Blogging, Research Skills, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Digital scholarship – Martin Weller speaks at our networkED seminar

This Wednesday is our third NetworkED (#LSENetED) seminar & we are very happy to welcome Professor Martin Weller from the Open University to speak about digital scholarship. Professor Weller will be offering us “10 digital scholarship lessons in 10 videos”, lessons that went into and came out of his recent book The Digital Scholar. The book, incidentally available in both traditional ‘pay-for-paper’ and ‘read-free-online’ formats, explores the meaning of scholarship in the digital age. The tools our digital age offers certainly have the potential to change Higher Education – but are they being used for that aim? And how does technology manifest its potential impact it can (or could) have on HE? Weller focuses on three main attributes: digital, networked, open. Each of these aspects of new technologies bear on teaching, learning and research in ways that might explode the old way of doing things scholarly and might give way to a whole different way of understanding scholarship. Above all, they open up the possibility of actually changing practice.
We’re certainly very excited to have Martin come and share his lessons & insights with us. More importantly however, I am excited about meeting him; because I’ve “known” him so far only as a digital presence. I’ve followed “@mweller” on twitter for quite some time now, occasionally benefitting from his 140 character nuggets of expertise – I say occasionally, because I am not half as disciplined a twitter user as I ought and want to be, not because these nuggets are only occasionally worthwhile… It should be interesting to put a human face to the tweets. Well, at least I assume that he is human, and I expect he will appear in full glorious Technicolor and… that he’ll be able to speak in chunks that exceed 140 characters. I am sure of it. But I’ll only find out on Wednesday, & I cordially invite you to find out with me. You can attend in person or online and find out all the lovely details on this page: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/events/networkED-seminar-series.php.

March 19th, 2012|Events & Workshops (LTI), Social Media|Comments Off|

Mourning the loss of the past – and blaming it on the digital age

Discussions of digital communication (blogs, twitter, email, sms) in traditional media such as radio or newspapers can be predictable and unsatisfactory. Keeping Radio4 on for company & background noise, I caught how this morning’s Woman’s Hour invited writer Barbara Taylor Bradford and Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor of The Telegraph to have a short debate on “how important is letter writing in the digital age”; in practice a piece to be filed under “nostalgia” (twitter hashtag #mythofthegoldenage).

The discussion was unfortunately set up by the presenter as a false dichotomy from the outset. She asked, rhetorically, if anyone would ever fondly re-read a blackberry message ‘c u @ nandos’ as they would a handwritten love letter. But this is a case of not comparing like with like. All three agreed that more work, and thus more care, goes into fashioning a handwritten letter on beautiful stationery, but in comparison to what? A successful blogger will take great care and trouble over crafting their posts. I can agonise over my responses on public political blogs, even when posting under a pseudonym. I want to be fair, I want to get my facts right and I don’t like typos. Sentiments such as friendship and love can be expressed very well in an email and perhaps more legibly if one’s handwriting, after years of keyboard use, resembles that of a deranged monkey. The art of slow writing hasn’t died out merely because it is now done electronically. Championing the handwritten letter is a charming cause, but it needs not be done in opposition to digital writing. While the medium matters, and is, pace McLuhan, itself a message worthy of focus independent of content, it seems to me a futile exercise to construct a hierarchy of media. Especially if, predictably, older ones will score more highly, because of that human condition, nostalgia. Nostalgia is a kind of home sickness, a longing for the familiar, an understandable emotion, but not one which ought to be overindulged.

Our foremothers in the 15th Century might have similarly asked “wither the Illuminated text in the Gutenberg age”. And some of them will then have projected forward rather than glanced backward, visualising that the printing press might enable them to focus more on what is being communicated and less on how prettily it is presented.

September 19th, 2011|Social Media|Comments Off|

Ask the audience – again and again

Asking students (or any audience) questions breaks up the monotony of unidirectional lecturing/ presenting, keeps minds from wandering, turns them into active, reciprocal participants, engages them beyond listening.

At large or online events, which lack the intimacy of small seminars, there are a variety of online tools or classroom technologies that can be used to help enable this.

At LSE we use TurningPoint as our PRS (Personal Response System) or EVS (electronic voting system) – a software/ hardware combination that allows lots of participants (500+) to respond. Questions are created in PowerPoint (the software works as a plugin, and question slides are created as easily as PowerPoint slides), and students vote with little remote controls (officially called “response cards”, but everyone refers to them as clickers.) The LSE100 course uses this system extensively, and students are asked to borrow a clicker for the year from the library to bring to all their LSE100 lectures.

April 14th, 2011|Social Media, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|1 Comment|

Review of social citation tools

I have recently reviewed a number of social citation tools to see how they might support the work of a large research team. I thought my notes on these tools might be of interest.

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com /

Mendeley is both a reference management tool and an academic social network. It is a desktop application as well as a website. Some of the features that Mendeley supports include:

Automatically generate bibliographies
Collaborate easily with other researchers online
Easily import papers from other research software
Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
Access your papers from anywhere online

The desktop application allows you to keep all of your citations, references, and papers sorted, searchable, and neatly filed away on your hard drive. You can tag them, search the full text and annotate your PDFs using the Desktop application. You can also use it to create bibliographies.

March 2nd, 2011|Research Skills, Social Media, Tools & Technologies|4 Comments|

Twitter at LSE Teaching Day

For LSE Teaching Day 2010 we heavily promoted the use of Twitter as a backchannel communication tool and were very pleased with the results. Twitter updates relating to Teaching Day were identifiable by the event tag: #lsetd10

Participation

The 249 updates* were made by 29 people, 16 LSE staff & students and 13 non-LSE showing how backchannel communication can extend beyond the walls of a face-to-face event. The event had 180 delegates.

A large majority of tweets came from a small number people:

Only 7 people reached double figures
One person, @tweeduizendzes was responsible for almost 1/3 of the updates
Top 5 tweeters accounted for 77% of the updates

Types of Updates

Tweets can be standard updates, replies (directed at someone in response to an update), mentions (an update referencing somone else) or retweets (one person re-posting another’s earlier update).

Updates 63%
Retweets 26%
Replies 6%
Mentions 5%

I have attempted to classify the 249 tweets based on their purpose with the following results:

Reporting 43%
Commenting 29%
Enhancing 16%
Assisting 7%
Asking 6%

Below are some examples of updates from a wide variety of people (so the top tweeters are heavily under-represented!)

Reporting

The largest group of tweets (43%) were ‘reporting’ what was being said, what people were doing & so on.

@Puplett: #lsetd10 Leape: challenge is to share good teaching practice

@jsecker: LSE Teaching day Nicola Lacey says skills should embedded in a course #lsetd10

About a quarter of the reporting updates were retweets. So in the following example my original update was retweeted by @Dcotton11 (non-LSE) amplifying the message by forwarding it to a wider audience.

@DCotton11: RT @mattlingard: ‘Digital refugees’ have been thrown into the mix by student panelist those who don’t engage or see a benefit #lsetd10

Commenting

Almost a third could be classified as commenting. This may be a comment on what is being said or being done at the event as well as comments on other online comments.

@jenibrown: Definitely agree that there is too much PowerPoint in teaching talks conferences etc. #lsetd10

@jobadge: @mattlingard I see your point another of out staff @jon_scott does 6 mins audio summaries of key points much better for revision #lsetd10

@amber_miro: #lsetd10 really enjoyed the lecture capture debate

Enhancing

There were 39 updates that I have classified as ‘enhancing’ because they add some further information such as an example, a link or a photo .

@mattlingard: ASKe website that Liz just highlighted in the Feedback session http://www.brookes.ac.uk/aske/ #lsetd10

@dave_lew: #lsetd10 in the final session before the wine reception http://twitpic.com/1ow3sp

Assisting

‘Assisting’ tweets include announcements & answers to questions. They mainly originated from the conference organisers.

@tweeduizendzes: RT @mattlingard: LSE staff – watch Nicola Lacey’s Teaching Day keynote online from 10am http://ow.ly/1Moo6 (LSE login required) #lsetd10

@lseclt: First session is the keynote by Nicola Lacey Teaching Skills through Substance starting soon in Sheikh Zayed #lsetd10

Asking

15% of the updates were questions:

@NanaChatzi: #lsetd10 how do we assess effectiveness of P-S?

@authenticdasein: most imp question of the day – what shall I wear for #lsetd10?

Promotion of the Backchannel

The use of twitter for backchannel communication at #lsetd10 was promoted by running two pre-conference workshops (slides) and a flyer in the delegate pack as well as making sure the tag was included in emails, on the website & mentioned in the welcome speech. During the event we also used visibletweets.com to display updates on various plasma screens at the venue.

* The statistics in this post are based solely on the 249 updates that were tweeted during the event.

June 25th, 2010|Events & Workshops (LTI), Social Media, Syndicated, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|