Last changed 26 March 2016 ............... Length about 1,000 words (13,000 bytes).
(Document started on 3 Mar 2014.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/courses/cereTwitter.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [courses] [CERE] [this page] [2cc]

Twitter channel and CERE

By Steve Draper, Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow.

CERE14 and 2cc trial with twitter

This year (2014) I'm trying out a Twitter channel as a part of the CERE course. (This was inspired by a talk by Graeme Pate, and my ideas on this in general will appear eventually on this page.)

The Twitter Hashtag for this channel / course appeared on the course Moodle page (we don't really want people not on the course using it).

As explained in the first session, to participate in the lectures:

Create a Twitter account before you come;
Bring a web enabled device to the lecture;
Login via WiFi (it works fine in the lecture room);
The Twitter feed will be displayed and updated continuously during the two hour lecture sessions.

Formats for re-accessing the tweets from documents posted up in Moodle after each session:

the tweets from during the lecture session on a prettified web page (created by the tool Storify)

the tweets from during the lecture session in a spreadsheet (from a tool created by Martin Hawksey http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter-archive-tagsv5/)
Sample of spreadsheet columns we selected out from this:

Twitter username	Tweet text	Date/time sent
CEREluke	Hello #cere14	2014-02-20 10:19:08
214333x	What struck me most was the differing goals of the institution, staff, and students in the HE learning environment. #cere14	2014-03-06 01:54:32

That spreadsheet, re-sorted by author so that you can easily pick out your own (perhaps you want to copy/paste them into some document of your own).
You can "mine" the tweets in different ways, by sorting the spreadsheet in different ways e.g. in chronological order, in reverse; by author or by time.

Mining the tweets directly yourself:

You can use Twitter's simple search interface to retrive them yourself.
Topsy search for tweets Add "specific range" spec. in left hand menus.
You can use Twitter's advanced search interface
Topsy: still more advanced search interface (can specify time period you want to retrieve; put in hashtags as words in the search)
Periodically we'll post up all tweets so far, in and out of class (posted in Moodle)

Following Graeme, we can crudely classify contributions (tweets) into 3 classes, as in this table. There are 27 students enrolled. The table shows student contributions; Sarah added about as many again.

Period Staff tweets Student tweeters Hallos Total student tweets with content Q&A Links, refs Comments, re-expressions

Session 1 1 11 11 9 2 3 4

Gap 4 1 0 2 1 0 0

Session 2 7 5 1 6 3 1 2

Gap 9 8 0 17 2 0 15

Session 3 7 1 0 2 0 0 2

Gap 0 1 0 0? 1 0 0

Session 4 10 0 1 0 0 0 0

Gap 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

Session 5 7 3 1 3 0 3 0

Total up to end of last class 46 18 (of 27) 14 39 9 7 23

Period	Staff tweets	Student tweeters	Hallos	Total student tweets with content	Q&A	Links, refs	Comments, re-expressions
Session 1	1	11	11	9	2	3	4
Gap	4	1	0	2	1	0	0
Session 2	7	5	1	6	3	1	2
Gap	9	8	0	17	2	0	15
Session 3	7	1	0	2	0	0	2
Gap	0	1	0	0?	1	0	0
Session 4	10	0	1	0	0	0	0
Gap	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
Session 5	7	3	1	3	0	3	0
Total up to end of last class	46	18 (of 27)	14	39	9	7	23

CERE16 and Tweetchat trial

This year, Sarah Honeychurch offered to lead a one-hour sync Tweetchat #CERE16 with my class, in the week after CERE lectures ended with the aims:

Try to give them a CI type experience as a flavour of how well it worked for SLH with the Rhizo MOOCs.

And as a demo of the CI ("Constructive Interaction") type of peer discussion, discussed in the course (see Miyake, 1986).
Her setup web page (to which I directed them) was: here.

Only 1 of the 16 enrolled students participated. A record is: here.

My pedagogical analysis of this failure

Good conversations need careful setting up, as the literature long ago made clear. In two ways probably:

Scaffolding: easing new users into the practices with lots of support. Sarah's plan here was to invite experienced friends, but this alone wasn't quite enough in this case. This idea is pure Vygotsky / Jean Lave's legitimate peripheral participation. The newbies do bits, but could never hold it together into a coherent and functional whole without the more experienced holding it together.
Catalysis. To get discussion going needs a "seed" or catalyst which provokes discussion. With old friends, who meet and chat regularly, this isn't so noticeable as they don't care if intellectually productive conversation happens all the time; but when someone mentions the right kind of thing, then it fires up. This is why (I speculate) that Timmons (??) found that skill at critical thinking in students depends on whom they live with. It is left to accident, but happens enough to make a serious difference over a year or 4 years. In contriving CI as experimentalists have done, requires careful design of a catalyst: a topic of discussion. Miyake did it with pilot studies, till she found a topic that worked on all her participants. Christine Howe not only had a topic (and a topic statement) but also contrived to have pairs of people who definitely differed in their views of it and and them "commit" to their view in advance so that they noticed that what the other person said was different to their view.
I had just worked this out explicitly in thinking over a partially successful student project in this area, but failed to apply my own theory to this project.
```
Fix the Doh: audio, popup but small IMG, clickable.
```
Doh!

Technical / tool links about Twitter

Creating a Twitter account here in advance. You may want to, and encourage students to, create a nw twitter account if they want to keep their class persona separate from other twitter interactions they have.
Mining the tweets directly yourself:
- You can use Twitter's simple search interface to retrive them yourself.
- Topsy search for tweets Add "specific range" spec. in left hand menus.
- You can use Twitter's advanced search interface
- Topsy: still more advanced search interface (can specify time period you want to retrieve; put in hashtags as words in the search)
- You can use Storify (see below) to mine and create a web page, showing a conversation in chronological order. Particularly useful for saving a history: otherwise the tweets disappear like rubbish in a corporation tip, so that they are too hard to find again.
Martin Hawksey created a tool to help, though it may not necessarily still work as Twitter modifies its software. http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter-archive-tagsv5/)
Storify. There is a tool "Storify" which helps create a single web page that documents a whole Twitchat. It shows it in chronological order (whilst Twitter normally shows tweets in the reverse order, newest first). CERE14 CERE16

Work-rounds for char-limit on length of tweets

Send a URL with a longer msg in. E.g. having a google doc open; put long answers in there; and send link to it a a tweet.
The app that turns text into an IMG (which you can tweet).

Troubles I have getting going on Twitter

Have to be fluent to have a conversation
- Follow a few people; get used to (reading) the style; (only) occasionally contribute.
- Train and be ready with tools to allow long tweets. See below. E.g. having a google doc open; put long answers in there; and send link to it a a tweet.
All my ideas for utterances are too long; no skill ready to hand for short interjections
Replying didn't go to the hashtag; so didn't work as a forum contribution but as a whisper in a corner.
A lot of trouble with the Twitter account. It kept wanting a confirmation but not accepting it but not saying it wasn't accepting it.
Why students do/not speak up
x

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [courses] [CERE] [this page]
[Top of this page]