Google Plus and Student Feeback

Following in the footsteps of my colleague Alan Cann, we’ve been piloting the use of Google Plus to support our first year undergraduate module (History of English) at the University of Leicester.

One of the ways we have used the stream is to encourage student feedback on the module on a week-by-week basis.  Traditionally, module feedback is taken once the teaching has finished and used to feed forward into the redesign of the module for the coming year.  We have not found a satisfactory way of allowing students to see what we do with their feedback, and only a small sample of students (10% of the cohort) usually completes the surveys.  But we know that feedback is vital, should be formative, rapid and dialogic.

Last week we posted our first ‘#Fridayreflection’ question, asking students to reflect on the role of Powerpoint presentations in lectures as part of their learning.  Only nine students (of the 160 signed up to the circle) posted to the stream on this topic, but still, the feedback was very useful. It has mean that we could modify the presentations right away (we are only in week 3 of the course) and, more importantly, we could talk with the students immediately about their comments.

I’m hoping that more students will join in, and I want to find a way of encouraging higher levels of engagement.  We are not assessing their contributions, so the feedback is voluntary.  If you’ve got suggestions, please let me know!

It's all about you? Celebrating a year of BBC Woman's Hour on Twitter

Earlier this week I got a call from the producer of BBC Woman's Hour, who had read the press release that the University of Leicester recently ran about my new book (Stories and Social Media).  Later this month (27th December), BBC Woman's Hour are running an item on Twitter and women. Very exciting!

So the linguist in me couldn't resist taking a peek at the tweets @bbcwomanshour have posted over the last year and seeing how their vital statistics matched up with some of the patterns I've observed in celebrity, corporate and 'ordinary' use of Twitter.  And this is what I found:

Followers v. Following:
The profile information for @bbcwomanshour lists 26,354 followers and 2,590.  Like celebrities and 'ordinary' Twitter members, there are more followers than those that @bbcwomanshour follows.  But the scale of the asymmetry is a ratio 10:1 (followers: following), so closer to the asymmetry that you see on average between 'ordinary' Twitter members (6:1), rather than the disparity on celebrity accounts (60:1).

Types of Tweet:

Like other members of Twitter, @bbcwomanshour use more updates (one-to-many broadcasts) than either directly addressed messages which appear in the public timeline or retweets. Based on the type of tweet, it would seem that @bbcwomanshour is not very conversational.

But that belies the way that @bbcwomanshour seems to be using Twitter, which is not only to promote upcoming features, but to ask the audience for their opinions.  If we look more closely at the pronouns that appear in the tweets, the updates use the pronouns 'you' and 'your' (that focus on the audience) far more frequently than 'us', 'our' or 'we' (that focus on the show's producers and presenters).  And this difference is especially obvious in @bbcwomanshour if we compare it with the way corporate accounts, celebrities and 'ordinary' members of Twitter talk, and if we compare it with large offline corpora (like the British National Corpus or the Contemporary Concordance of American English).

High frequency words and Hashtags
It's not surprising that the most frequent lexical items that appear in the word list for the @bbcwomanshour tweets are topped by 'tomorrow' (which is usually followed by information about an upcoming feature) and 'women' (which appears three times as frequently as 'men') and signals the main themes that the features address.  When we look at the hashtags which are used in tweets we can see that this focus on the show and its featured themes is still present: 8% of all the hashtags used by @bbcwomanshour were directly making the term '#bbcwomanshour' more visible.  The choice of hashtags also shows @bbcwomanshour engaging with current events (like #spendingreview, #tubestrikes), but more than anything else (even more than the #ff tag), the hashtags are about food: (#cooktheperfect, #cooking, #recipe, #pasta, #italianfood, #Maryberry and so on).

It's refreshing that @bbcwomanshour are not simply using Twitter to 'broadcast their brand'.  Their tweets show engagement with their audience (especially in the use of retweets which forward on audience comments for wider response).  And perhaps they hint of the importance that food has for 'women's talk'.  Given that I'm married to the wonderful @tobizzy2bake, talking about, making, eating and sharing food has a key place in family life and the friendships that surround our home. All we need now is for a form of virtual #cake that would actually taste good too.

Follow Friday as Self Branding

As you might know if you've been reading this blog for a while, I've been working on a paper which examines hashtags (#hashtags) in Twitter.  The paper is a study of how hashtags are used by corporate, celebrity and 'ordinary' Twitter accounts.  Today I've been writing about the 'Follow Friday' tag, and its implications for self branding. Here are a couple of paragraphs:

#FF is the abbreviation for ‘Follow Friday’, a weekly practice whereby Twitter members promote to their follower list the usernames of other members that are deemed worthy of interest. These recommendations are considered a token of esteem that within the linguistic economy of Twitter enhances the visibility and follower list of the nominated members. But while the Follow Friday practice appears in part altruistic, it also manifests subtle forms of self-branding, insofar as it enables the recommending updater to establish their position as an expert, who differentiates the hierarchies of perceived value in Twitter. The list of recommended usernames is one means by which the updater can display their network of contacts, and affirm their bonds within that network, which often (although not always) reflects their professional identity. For example, Selfridges uses #FF to promote fashion designers and magazines, the actor William Shatner’s ‘colleagues and friends’ include other actors and directors, while the lawyer recommended ‘legal industry peeps’.




#ff these legal industry peeps @karasmamedia @markbower @tessashepperson @jamesdunninggeo @brianinkster #law #uklaw

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:10



Follow Friday! #ff @vogue_london @grazia_live @nicolerichie

Selfridges, Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:43



Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:26:40 +0000 Another #FF for more colleagues and friends @rhettreese @willsasso @christophcarley @ac_field @paulcamuso and one more for @davidzappone

William Shatner, Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:26



The #FF tag also appeared with expressions of thanks, which both acknowledges and reaffirms the hashtag as a means of accruing visibility and support.



Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40:02 +0000 A BIG thank you to everyone who #FF, RTed & mentioned us over the weekend. We always appreciate your support!

Hoover, Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40



thanks for the #FF love @craigcalcaterra @Jason_IIATMS @fackyouk @BrentSGambill! Traveling, will #FF next week...

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:10



As a form of politeness, thanks imply that the recipient of the ‘Follow Friday’ is in the debt of the recommender. But, at the same time, posting such thanks also builds the reputation of the member by reproducing the recommendation and projecting their identity as someone who is esteemed to be worth following. In some cases, the #FF is explicitly self-promoting, where corporations and celebrities use the practice to advertise their products or outlets, such as the Travel Channel who promoted their new show, Deathwishmovers,



#FF @DeathwishMovers (our new show)

Travel Channel Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:15



Or the actress, Dannii Minogue who recommended the accounts for her fashion line (ProjectD), which sold through the department stores Selfridges and Marks and Spencer, and designed by Tabitha Webb.



#FF @projectdonline @selfridges @marksandspencer @tabswebb

Dannii Minogue, Fri, 14 May 2010 10:29.



What do you think your #FF recommendations say about you? Are they an altruistic attempt to build the reputation of others, or a subtle form of self promotion?

Checklist to be used when planning a new use of social media in HE

Next week, I'll be giving a presentation as part of the Guardian's Professional Seminar Series.  I want to help others think through the planning entailed in using social media to enhance the student experience, and so I've created a check list of questions.  Is there anything I've left out?

Resource gathering
• Has anyone else implemented the kinds of change you are planning? What can you learn from their experience?
• Are there any open resources that would be helpful?
• What equipment or software will be needed? Who will maintain/store it?

Training
• How many staff and students will be involved? What are their training needs?
• What help guides might be needed?
• When will you (or someone else) provide training/induction, coaching and practice sessions?

Departmental/Institutional issues
• How does your innovation fit within institutional /departmental policy and practices?
• Which other staff in your department might need to know about your innovation? What mechanisms are there for sharing good practice?
• If your innovation is based at a module level, what are the implications for other modules the students will undertake?
• Will the student work be archived? Available for other students (and others) to see in later years?
• Does your innovation have benefits for other students beyond your course? Are there links to be made with the library/study skills/employability provision?
• Will your use of social media duplicate existing modes of communication (e.g. email, VLE announcements)?
• Will your use of social media be public?

Role of the Tutor
• What will the role of the tutor entail? Providing content? Technical support? Trouble shooting? Moderation?
• Will tutors provide feedback to students? How often? When? How? How long will this take?
• How does the use of social media relate to what is taught in class contact time?
• Is the use of social media assessed? What criteria will be used?
• How will you ensure that students take part?
• How will you help students develop a public profile/voice through your intervention?

General
• What are your measures of success?
• What risks are entailed?
• Does your innovation create any digital divides, and if so, what can you do about it?

Corporate Twitter, interaction and synthetic personalization

I’ve been extending the analysis of ‘celebrity practice’ in Twitter that forms a chapter in my new book (Stories and Social Media) by comparing the language used in corporate Twitter accounts with the celebrity and ‘ordinary’ datasets that I gathered last year.


(Thanks again to my colleague Philip Shaw for his help with this!)

My analysis has focused on hashtags as identity markers, and today I was doing a more fine-grained (for which read 'manual') analysis of the grammatical contexts in which the most frequently occurring hashtags appear. It won’t surprise you that when the most frequent hashtags from corporate accounts occur with questions and/or imperatives, these projections of interaction are mechanistically reproduced (i.e. it is the exactly the same question that gets reposted numerous times).

I also observed that there were some modified Retweets in the updates with hashtags too, which I argued elsewhere is a form of synthetic personalization (Fairclough 1989): that is, a pseudo-backstage (in Goffman's sense) performance which simulates solidarity, but is more like a mass-media broadcast than peer-to-peer conversational exchanges.

Modified Retweets appeared in the updates from my datasets with the following frequency:

Corporate accounts: 20%

Celebrity accounts: 12%

‘Ordinary’ accounts: 5%

So my question is, why would this happen, or what do these results suggest?
Is it a case that the more ‘branded’ an account is, the greater the need for synthetic personalization?
Are the modified Retweets there to counterbalance (and give a personal voice in contrast to) the mechanistic questions and imperatives that co-occur with hashtagged-tweets in corporate accounts? 
Will 'ordinary' accounts employ dyadic interchange (one-to-one conversations) instead of one-to-many broadcasts?

What do you think?

Hashtags and communities of practice

I’ve begun to look at hashtags (#) used in tweets. I’m interested in the way that people use hashtags to signal their membership of wider groups, and so to indicate aspects of their identity.


Hashtags make a tweet searchable, and so visible to others who search for tweets on the same topic. If you search for the hashtag #worldcup2010 you will find all the tweets written about that event, whether or not you follow the people who wrote those messages.

One aspect of the hashtag is that it seems to signal participation in a shared event, for example

• going to a conference: #gurt2011 (Georgetown Roundtable 2011)

• Watching a TV show or mainstream media event: #Lost; #BGT; #worldcup2010

• Supporting a campaign: #foodrevolution, #stoptrafficking

• Commenting on national events: #ge2010 (general election 2010)

But I am not convinced that the use of the hashtag creates a ‘community of practice’ around these events. Although the participants are using the same linguistic repertoire, their tweets are isolated broadcasts and there is no ‘mutual engagement’. There are a lot of people all offering their opinions, but not necessarily engaging with each other (they are just all talking about the same topic, not to each other).

So is there an existing term that describes this aggregating effect, where the talk of an asynchronous and geographically disparate audience coalesces temporarily around a particular event? I know Anstead and O’Loughlin (2010) described this practice as a viewertariat, but I am talking about something wider than this, which mimics a community but is not one. Suggestions?

Using Antconc to search social media data

In my recent work on Twitter, I've been using the freely available and user-friendly concordancing software, Antconc to search for frequency and collocation patterns in the datasets I've compiled. 

On Thursday 23 June, 2011 at 10.am I'll be in the David Wilson Library Cafe, happy to chat about the basics of using Antconc.  If you'd like to join me for a coffee and an informal Antconc 101 seminar, you'd be very welcome.  Give me a shout on Twitter (@ruthtweetpage if you are coming along!