twitter study coming to a close

well, we're just in the final stages of tidying up the twitter study - most of the participants have finished (and are in the throes of exams and final hand-in deadlines) and joel is busy doing the reflective interviews with them at the moment. i had hoped to blog more regularly about some of the emerging themes, but unfortunately real-life took over in a number of ways (best laid plans and all!). so i thought it'd be time to reflect on the methodolgy at this point.

fairly early on in the study, i mentioned that it was working better than i'd hoped - and i'm glad to say that the good feeling lasted! obviously giving students vouchers for participating helped with the motivation, but in terms of the quantity and quality of the tweets we seemed to get more than we'd asked for from most of the participants. asking for the longer summaries based on the information we'd had from each participant was also useful - we were able to ask targetted questions of individuals rather than generic questions, and again in the majority of cases the quality of the summaries was fantastic. it'll be interesting to review again after the interviews and see whether we can identify what the twitter-based part of the study added to the overall process.

in terms of what we can do with the data so far, we've obviously got some really useful information about individual preferences, which we can take out to a larger population in future - one possibility is generating a set of preference statements and using these to develop a survey, which will hopefully allow us to capture a wide range of viewpoints from across the institution. another great use for this very rich, contextual sort of data is within staff development - exploring some of the assumptions that staff and students hold has proved to be a great way of generating conversations and engagement in the past. there are also some ideas about how the institution can make things work better for students - some small scale, quick changes that we can try to implement, some things that will take longer to do. again, having the student voice is often helpful for this, and can help negotiate some of the barriers to practical challenges. and on a more immediate note, it's really good (and reassuring!) to see how some of the changes we're planning for the learning centre over the summer align with the sorts of messages we're getting from the study.

more later :)