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 :)

tweeting about spaces for learning

i'm so ridiculously excited about this!

a while ago i started playing with twitter, the micro-blogging site. at first, it didn't seem like such a big deal - writing a short update (a 'tweet') about what i was doing at any point in time (usually either "sat at work" or "yay! work's over - off to the pub...") was mildly diverting, and reading other people's tweets was interesting - but just confirmed that everyone else has a much more interesting life than me. and then one day, while on the cross-campus dash between shu's city and psalter lane sites, i sent an update from my phone - and suddenly, i had a hare-brained idea...

at the time we were looking at appropriate methodology for the next phase of learning spaces research. we're particularly interested in how the attributes of spaces make them conducive - or not - to informal learning. we'd been thinking about using reflective diaries - something that had worked well previously as part of our e-learning research - but what if we could get our students to tell us what they were doing at the point in which they were doing it? what if they could tell us where they were learning there and then?

like most hare-brained schemes, we decided to get it up and running as soon as possible (after all, if we waited too long someone might point out its lack of scientific validity or sanity). and so, this week we're starting a 2-week study, whereby 15 students have been recruited to provide around 15 updates a week about where they're learning. a couple of them have started to provide us with updates ahead of time (if you suffer from continuous partial attention like i do, you can check out http://twitter.com/learningspaces/with_friends to see the updates as they come through - otherwise, i'll post occasional summaries and reflections on this blog along the way).

of course, this is the first time we've ever tried this, so it could all go horribly wrong...but i'm excited anyway to see how it works out :)