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 :)

endless distractions...

i did mean to update this towards the end of last week, but 'distraction' has been a bit of a theme recently. aside from the distractions provided by various other, urgent work-related things (from which the tweets themselves have been proving welcome distraction, obviously...) we've recently received the first sets of longer summaries from the participants - which have sent me off in all sorts of directions. and one of the themes that's come up time and again is that of - you've guessed it! - distraction(s) within the environment.

we picked 3 things that each participant had talked about, and asked them to provide a little more information about each. the areas we asked about covered things such as:

• choice of physical location for activity (eg, do you only choose this location for one type of learning activity, or does it support others equally?)
• what made this location work for you and/or what about it hindered you (eg, presence or lack of technology?; access to resources and/or people?; atmosphere? etc)
• opportunistic use of locations (eg, unbooked classrooms, transport, etc)

we've now got some fairly rich summaries that cover a number of issues, which we're hoping to investigate further during the later interviews.

one thing that's struck me, though, is the human dimension to the spaces that our students are using. in some cases, having other people around provides a distraction (sometimes welcome, sometimes not!). for example, some students prefer not to use a particular location because the other people who use it create too much noise, preventing them from concentrating or having meaningful discussions. on other occasions, lack of other people can be equally disturbing - one student describing parts of the library as 'too quiet' to concentrate; another talking about how she doesn't like studying in the library over night as it's 'too spooky' with only security staff around. conversely, another student talks about how she often chooses the library to work in because although she can access resources from home, the presence of other students - even those she doesn't know - makes her feel 'safe'.

musing on progress to date

rather ambitiously, last year we put together a conference proposal to talk about learning space developments, cultural change, and barrier negotiation. the conference is now looming (yikes!) and i'm having fun putting together the presentation.

no, really, it is fun. particularly as i'm working on the barriers section, and thinking of some of the conversations we've had over the past year or so. the presentation (at oxford brooke's social learning symposium) will be framed specifically around developments in the learning centre, which has been a somewhat contentious issue, some people feeling understandably protective over spaces that they feel they own.

without giving the game away, so far, i've come up with 4 key barriers to cultural change in the learning spaces arena, which appear somewhat predictably regardless of type of space, or stage of development:

• everyone's an expert (ie, i know what i want from my space, therefore it must be right for everyone, surely?)
• ownership (ie, you're not changing *my* spaces!)
• the 'f' word (ie, you're asking what i want? well, it has to be...flexible)
• the 'i' word (ie, flexible isn't good enough? well then, it has to be...innovative)

exploring these and thinking explicitly about negotiation strategies is proving to be interesting, and i'll start to explore them in more depth over the coming weeks. meantime, this was just a 'starter for ten' post - in the hope that one day, i might get around to updating this more regularly. fingers crossed... :)