One of my favourite things about using twitter is the hashtag as highlighted by this tweet of the two-days-ago.
Tweet of the other Day
Adding a hashtag to a tweet links tweets together. So, earlier this week at the University of Leicester there was a face-to-face seminar to discuss a facebook study carried out there. The hashtag #ormfb was used by those attending or following the event resulting in pages of tweets. Many of the tweets are ‘trivial’ but does that matter? Some aren’t and what’s important as well are the new connections that are being made. I’m not at Leicester, knew nothing of the report but happened to spot #ormfb in a tweet by @AJCann so I asked what it was, and was told by @stujohnson and I then found @jennifermjones who I’d never come across before but now follow!
Hashtags are great for conferences and featured heavily at ALT-C 2008. #altc2008 on twitter: 300+ tweets before, during and after the event. And of course it’s not just twitter and hashtags. The altc2008 tag was used on flickr, blog posts, delicious and no doubt elsewhere. See my conference page for examples.
Neil’s research was carried out in the School of Social Science of a large ‘Russell Group’ university and is based on the wall postings of 600+ students over a 4-month period. 4% of the wall postings were found to be related to the students’ studies or aspects of their university experience. These 2000+ postings we classified as follows:
Recounting & reflecting on the university experience
Exchange of practical information
Exchange of academic information
Displays of supplication and/or disengagement
Exchanges of humour and nonsense
The discussion (indeed the whole paper!) are well worth a read but here are some of the findings. Facebook is being used by these students for education-related interactions but on a small scale and mainly to maintain links within an existing network. The Facebook wall postings appeared to be one part of multi-modal conversations involving IM, email, SMS and of course face-to-face. The interactions are seen as important but also nothing new, just a continuation of existing offline practice.
My favourite quote from the wall postings has to be “I am so done with this vygotsky shizzle, it’s driving me insane!!!!!!!”
This blog is rapidly turning into a set of statistics on the use of social technologies… so I think this will be the last post on that theme for a while. The graph below comes from an eMarketer article but I was pointed in that direction during a fruitless search for something else (below) which landed me at the US Students Affairs Blog
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