Twitter Friends network map

One of the things that has made me think about my course project is how to measure what I’m trying to look at: informal learning in social networking services.

One thing I’m very clear on is how much I learn from the brilliant people in my Twitter network. So how can I try to assess and measure what is going on around me?

The basic methodology for my research is to do a case study of a number of users by carrying out a content analysis over a period of time and then map these to the user intention categories outlined in Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities:

• Daily Chatter
• Conversations
• Sharing information/URLs
• Reporting news

I’ve sub divided these categries to try to assess what they are about.

Great, so that gives me content analysis of what is happening with this group of users, but doesn’t offer any idea of whether there is an opportunity for learning to take place.

My tutor Terry King switched me on to George Siemens and his work on Connectivism (and through him I got into the work of all the fab people who were talking about edupunk a while ago), so the idea from my end is to try to map the tweets on to the connectivist model.

This should give me some interesting data to have a look at.

One brilliant thing I have found, and will be testing in a pilot of the coding sheet and service, is using Googledocs forms to create a coding sheet. The thing I love about it is all the responses are poured into a spreadsheet as soon as the reply happens. And given this can be downloaded as an excel file means it is a pretty powerful tool to use.

I’ll blog about the results of that when I’ve finished it.

Then I think a spot of surveying to get some idea of what other people think, and whether my perceptions about Twitter as a great place for informal learning are being shared by others.

And I’m starting to wonder about the number of people who could use respond to a googledocs survey – could be an interesting way forward.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens – Mar 7 09 (masternewmedia.org)
• Is social networking learning? (shannonturlington.com)
• Informal learning community (egrommet.net)
• Twitter Is More Than Connecting (marketingpilgrim.com)

Been reading a lot about Communities of Practice recently and thinking I’m not quite looking at the right thing – particularly as Wenger and Lave are talking about communities within the same organisation. But one thing that has struck me in what I have been reading is this quote:

It is life itself that is the main learning event. Schools, classrooms, and training sessions still have a role to play in this vision, but they have to be in the service of the learning that happens in the world.

Etiene Wenger

Some of the most useful things I’ve picked up in my life haven’t been in the classroom, but from outside it. – from teachers, colleagues and former colleagues, friends and passing acquaintances. This kind of informal learning is vital to what we do.

So what happens when we want to learn about our job – or practice as I suppose I should be saying – but we are already tapping our in-house communities?

The answer is, obviously, turn outside. Once we’d have to go to conferences or union/local professional body meetings.

In the age of online networks we become part of an online or virtual community.

Question of semantics

But can what I’m looking at be considered a community – even in the online sense?

Community often invokes the idea of relationships – Gemeinschaft is one definition used. But some of the interactions I’m interested in happen between people who will probably never ever meet each other.

One argument is this could be a community of interest, or again community of practice – but what I’m thinking doesn’t fit in with what I’ve been reading of Wenger and Lave’s work.

Brown and Duguid, on the other hand, suggest that what is happening here is a network of practice.

In their book The Social Life of  Information they define networks of practice as:

networks that link people to others whom they may never get to know, but who work on similar practices.

Ok, now I feel I’m getting somewhere. They go on to add that networks of practice:

• Share practice and knowledge
• Usually have indirect links
• Members don’t interact with one another directly to any significant degree

They further say:
Collectively such social systems don’t take action and produce little knowledge. They can, though, share information relating to the members’ common practices quite efficiently.

Brown and Duguid believe that new information technologies “are well suited to support, develop and even strengthen… networks of practice. The growing reciprocity available on the the Net, while probably underused at the moment (bearing in mind they copy I’ve got was written in 2000), is helping people separated by space maintain their dense interrelations.”

So, back to Twitter then

My Twitter network can be broken down into a number of smaller networks, two of which are practice based: journalism and e-learning.

These networks do share practice and knowledge. But we do have direct links, and the ability to talk directly to each other, and there is a significant amount of interaction among various members of the networks on a very informal basis – kind of like being in a kitchen at a party. And like the kitchen party it isn’t considered rude to join in with other people’s chats.

I’d argue that tools like Twitter allow this reciprocity that was missing under Web 1.0, which in turn allow these interrelations to develop.

It does allow sharing of knowledge and I’d argue, at least in the case of people like @paulbradshaw, the generation of knowledge. But yes, this efficient sharing of information is crucial.

Admittedly Twitter is just one part of our online environment, just one tool that allows us to share, generate, discuss and reflect on the changes happening around us. But it is an interesting tool for a community/network to use to talk in both the professional and personal domain, and can be used to notify of developments using links – before we even get onto the idea of micro-reflection on events.

And as well as being able to share what we develop from our personal news environment or personal learning environment, the definition depends on which of my networks you come from, with our wider offline communities of practice – those of us who use social tools are often keen to meet each other.

Interestingly the strength of the interaction and its immediacy does mean that it doesn’t feel awkward when we meet in World 1.0 – for example I’d never met @adders, @shanerichmond or @foodiesarah offline until recently, but what was really our first meeting was actually just another way for us to carry on our chats.

So maybe, we are in the process of building some kind of community of practice that spans the online and offline worlds, spans company and (in some cases) national borders and allows us to talk and share with those who are interested in the same fields of practice as ourselves. Maybe it gives us a social life where we can share and learn while reflecting and sharing jokes (this means you @jemimakiss) during our normal life. Try explaining that one to your boss.

Not bad in 140 characters really.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Social Life of Information
• Informal learning community
• Social networks and learning networks
• Collaboration in the Virtual World

I’ve been on Twitter for a while now and find it a really useful place to hang out – mostly because of the easy access to such an interesting network of people (that means you if you’ve come here from twitter).

I’ve been learning a lot in a number of fields – my network consists of journalists, elearning types, developers and just plain interesting folks – and this kind of informal learning where the network shares information and ideas really interests me.

One of the key issues for me is a how a group of like-minded professionals (or people with a shared interest) can use a web 2.0 service to share developments and use Twitter as part of a personal learning network. So that, in a nutshell, is what I’m interested in.

As a journalism trainer, I’m obviously interested in how this can be used by journalists (although as an elearning type I’m also interested in this area too). But I’m going to do a case study based around journalists.

I’ve spoken to a couple of people and asked if they mind being part of a case study (they kindly said yes!) and I’ll be contacting some more in the near future.

And in the meantime I’m doing the reading on communities, learning, communities of practice and more!