Tag Archives: Social Media

Who owns a hashtag?⤴

I’m doing a MOOC from Futurelearn at the moment with some friends: Social Media Analytics: Using Data to Understand Public Conversations It’s interesting, I am getting to use some familiar software (TAGS) and some new stuff (Tableau), and it’s good to think through all of this with others. One of the topics for this week is the concept of public spaces – how a hashtag can create them. And, as a result of that I’d started thinking about public and private spaces, and conversations I’d had in the past about how, though Twitter is public, sometimes one does not like to join in a conversation one sees as it’s not clear whether those speaking would welcome the intervention, or see it as an intrusion. (For the record, if I am tweeting to some people and others want to chip in, that’s great – that’s one of the reasons I’ll be tweeting and not using email, Facebook, or any of the other more “private” spaces I have.)

But, as I say, the MOOC has got me thinking – and one of the things it’s got thinking about is this: who owns a hashtag? This post has been brewing for a couple of days now – and at the back of my mind was the idea that I’d introduce it by telling a funny story, then something happened that gave me pause. Well, I’ll tell you both stories …

Ages ago, probably when something like a rhizo or a pop up CLMOOC was happening, some of us happened upon a hashtag. You know how it is – you’re chatting, you hashtag your tweet with #SomethingYouThinkAmusingOrApt and think no more about it. Maybe your friends also use the hashtag. Tweets and Tweeps can do that. But not this time. Oh, no. This time was different. As we carried on conversing (without the #AmusingOrApt hashtag), a very angry person replied to us all. Apparently we were USING HER HASHTAG. Hers, just hers. Her hashtag for her personal use. She had bagsied it and that meant that nobody else could use it. NEVER. NOT EVER. Well, as I recall, we ignored her and left her to her solitary tweeting (honestly – she was tweeting onto a void using the hashtag – nobody was replying to her or “liking” her tweets), but it made me think: can somebody really own a hashtag? Can one person, or a group of people, dictate to others how they can and can’t use it? Surely not – that’s just not how Twitter works. But then this happened …

I noticed a Tweet this morning that interested me. It was hashtagged #LTHEChat, and hence came up in one of my columns in TweetDeck. It was about learning and teaching in HE, the person tweeting was an #LTHEChat “regular” as were the others in the conversation. It seemed relevant. I replied, also with the hashtag. That’s how Twitter works. But, then, I got a notification of a reply to us and saw this:

Looks like a great topic for a future #LTHEchat! But perhaps not in the channel for the current one?
— LTHE Tweetchat (@LTHEchat) November 20, 2019

Hmmm. Well, I am not sure. Is that how it works? Do the volunteers behind the “official” Twitter account get to be hashtag monitors? Maybe. The chat happens on Wednesday evenings from 8-9pm, and I can see that part of a facilitator’s role might be to keep conversations roughly on track. Maybe. But does that mean that nobody can use the hashtag for other conversations, at other times? Surely not. So if we, as a community (I think that #LTHEChat is a community now, by the way), want to use the hashtag outwith the regular chat times, should we be policed? Of course, in a sense, nobody can STOP me using any hashtag I want, but if we’re talking about social niceties (which I think I am), then what sort of conventions would we like to see in place, or follow ourselves?

I don’t have hard and fast answers to this. I do think it’s worth talking about. So I am going to publish this now and tweet it. And I am going to hashtag it #LTHEChat. You can tell me if you think I am out of order for doing this.

“Got Hash Tag?” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

ALTC Keynotes: Data, Dialogue and Doing⤴

from Open World

Social Media Dream Team, CC BY Lorna M. Campbell

Last week the ALT Conference took place in the magnificent McEwan Hall at the University of Edinburgh. Chaired by Melissa Highton, Keith Smyth and Louise Jones, the conference was a huge success, thanks in no small part to the ALT Team, and a large number of volunteers from across the ALT community. As Martin Weller pointed out in his blog post, The Meticulous Informality of ALTC, it takes a lot of hard work and expertise to make running such a big conference appear so effortless. And as always, it was a real pleasure to be able to contribute to the conference as part of the ALTC Social Media Dream Team. I even got a badge this year!

I’ve written before about my experience of livetweeting the ALTC keynotes, and how it differs from tweeting from my own personal account. When I’m providing formal social media coverage I also have a different experience of actually participating in the conference, and listening to the keynotes in particular. I tend to be so focused on listening, summarising and typing, that I often get to the end of the keynote and realise that I can barely remember even half of what the speaker has said! So it’s really useful to me to be able to look back over the livestreams and the tweets and to read all the post-conference blog posts to fill in the gaps.

One of the things that really struck me this year was how closely all three keynotes focused on the key conference themes of Data, Dialogue and Doing.

Revisiting the affordances and implications of interconnectedness and socially mediated publicness

– Sue Beckingham, Sheffield Hallam University

Sue set the scene with a wide ranging opening keynote covering the long history of the myriad technologies that collect and process our data in various ways, shapes and forms; from the panopticon to the Echo Dot, via keystroke tracking, store cards, VLEs, facebook and the invisible algorithms of the web. Sue asked how many of us read the terms of service of the websites and apps we sign up to? How many of us know how our data is being used?

Sue also highlighted the pros and cons of engaging with social media. Twitter can be toxic, filled with disinformation, misinformation and fake news, but it can also be invaluable for promoting research, disseminating crisis communications, highlighting achievements, and building community. Sue stressed that it’s no good banning social media, we need to have meaningful conversations with students about how their data is being used. And we also need to ensure that those who are marginalised from our education communities are accepted, wanted and drawn in. Sue quoted Fosslien and West Duffy who define “diversity as having a seat at the table, inclusion as having a voice, and belonging as having that voice be heard”. Social media can enable diverse voices to be included and heard but we need to be cognisant of how our data is being used by these platforms.

Sue Beckingham, CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology

Watch Sue’s keynote https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2019/sessions/altc-keynote-sue-beckingham/

Critcal Pedagaogy, Civil Disobedience and Edtech

– Jessie Stommel, University of Mary Washington

Jessie picked up on many of the themes Sue introduced. Within a framework of critical pedagogy and digital agency he explored the interfaces between agency, data and technology, and how the tools we use as educators influence our relationship with our students. Jessie urged us to ask hard questions of vendors and to engage students in this critical evaluation. What assumptions about learning and teaching does a tool make? What data does it collect? Who has access to it? Is it accessible? To visually impaired, to introverts, to extroverts?

Jessie argued that while some tools can be hacked to good use, others have bad pedagogy baked in and are problematic to the core. It was no surprise that the tool he chose to shine the spotlight of critical evaluation on was Turnitin. It’s easy to critique Turnitin from many different perspectives, not least of which is that it effectively has a monopoly on student writing, with a staggering 98% of UK HE institutions subscribing to its services. Jessie highlighted Turnitin’s problematic Terms of Reference but, perhaps more importantly, he also argued that Turnitin has suspicion of students baked into it and entrenches the belief that students are not to be trusted.

“We are opting in to a culture of suspicion of our students and Turnitin enables this.”

Jessie reminded us that our students are human beings not data assets. We need to trust our students, to learn from and with them, and we need to believe what they tell us about how they learn. Throughout his keynote Jessie returned again and again to Paulo Friere and bell hooks with their focus on learning as a space of wonder and marvel and the importance of generating excitement, joy and pleasure in education. Quoting bell hooks Jessie reminded us that

“If we’re not talking about joy we’re doing something wrong.”

Jessie Stommel, CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology

Watch Jessie’s keynote: https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2019/sessions/altc-keynote-jesse-stommel/

Learning, Teaching and Technology

– Ollie Bray, The Lego Foundation

Ollie certainly brought excitement and joy to his keynote when he handed out packets of Lego to the entire audience and challenged everyone to make a duck in 40 seconds! We ended up with as many different ducks as delegates, but Ollie pointed out that every duck was meaningful to the person who made it. Furthermore, the activity itself was meaningful because it was actively engaging, socially interactive, iterative and joyful. These are typical characteristics of a playful experience and they are also characteristics of an excellent learning experience.

Ollie challenged us to think about how we could reimagine learning as it could be, while still working within the distinct boundaries of our education systems and social contexts. Creative skills are highly contextual and it’s important to develop personalised skills that suit specific needs.

Picking up on another of Jessie’s themes, Ollie noted that we hear a lot about learning from our students, but less about learning with them. If we want young learners to be creative, we need children and adults working together in co-creative learning teams. Despite the rhetoric that AI will “solve” education, solving complex problems comes down to people, pedagogy and leadership.

40 second Lego duck challenge, CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology

Watch Ollie’s keynote: https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2019/sessions/altc-keynote-ollie-bray/

One of the things I loved about Ollie’s keynote was that it rippled out beyond the bounds of the conference. Lots of delegates took the Lego duck challenge home and posted pictures of ducks made by their families. These are the ducks my family made. I’m sure they’re meaningful to them somehow :}

Meaningful ducks? CC BY Lorna M. Campbell

Putting your best foot forward with #altc⤴

from Open World

[This post was previously posted on the ALTC website.]

What to expect from the ALT Conference’s social media channels and how to get involved.

The ALT Conference is almost upon as and we’re looking forward to welcoming delegates to the city and University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a wonderful city to visit at any time of the year, but we appreciate that traveling to attend conferences is not always practical or possible, so in order to ensure that the conference is as accessible and inclusive as possible, ALT provides a range of online channels to enable you to participate in the conference remotely. Frances Bell has already written a really helpful post on how to participate in the conference online.

In addition to watching the ALT conference livestream, and signing up for VConnecting sessions, you can engage with the conference through ALT’s social media channels and the #altc hashtag, which is already hotting up as delegates prepare for the conference.

The ALT Conference has always had a really lively and engaging social media presence, which draws in participants from all over the world. I’m delighted to help facilitate this as part of ALT’s social media team, along with partners in crime Rich Goodman (@bulgenen), from the University of Loughborough, and photographer Chris Bull (@chrisbull1980). My role is to livetweet the conference keynotes from ALT’s official twitter account @A_L_T, while Rich will be tweeting Chris’ photographs, which really capture the buzz and energy of the conference. You can see Chris’ pictures from last year’s ALT Conference on ALT’s flickr channel, and in keeping with ALT’s strategic commitment to openness, they’re all Creative Commons licensed.

CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for the Association for Learning Technology on flickr

I’ve written several blog posts over the years about my experience of live tweeting the ALT conference, and in my CMALT portfolio I reflected on the difference between tweeting for ALT in an official capacity, and tweeting from my own personal account:

Live tweeting in an official capacity for events such as the ALT Conference requires a different approach to live tweeting from my own personal account. When I live tweet on behalf of an event organiser I try to keep my tweets as factual, neutral and representative as possible. It’s important not to misrepresent the speaker or inadvertently tweet anything that might bring the organisation into disrepute. If I’m tweeting personally, I tend to tweet the points that interest me, adding my own thoughts and comments along the way.

The ALT Conference has a justifiable reputation for the quality of its keynotes, and this year is no exception. Although it can be a little daunting, it’s a real privilege to livetweet such inspirational speakers.

It’s hard to overestimate the influence Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) has had on the learning technology community in the UK, through her blog Social Media for Learning, the weekly #LTHEchat twitter chat, and the open online course Bring Your Own Device for Learning. Sue brings a nuanced and critical approach to the use of social media in teaching and learning and is generous in sharing her practice and experience with the community.

I heard Ollie Bray (@olliebray) speaking many years ago when he was Head Teacher at Kingussie High School and I remember being really intrigued by his inspirational approaches to teaching and learning and innovative use of technology and social media, so I’m really looking forward to hearing about and livetweeting his recent work connecting play and education at the LEGO Foundation.

I’m particularly thrilled to hear Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer), as I’ve followed him on twitter for some time and I’m a huge admirer of his work. Just a few weeks ago I was following the Digital Pedagogy Lab, co-founded by Jesse, on twitter and though I only dipped my toe into the incredibly rich stream of tweets it was a really rewarding and thought provoking experience.

Whether you’ll be with us in Edinburgh or joining us remotely, we’d encourage you to get involved with the ALT Conference online. You can do this by:

Following the official ALT twitter account @A_L_T / https://twitter.com/A_L_T
Following the conference hashtag #altc
Tweeting your own comments, reflections and pictures on the #altc conference hashtag.
Sharing your photographs online, remember to use the #altc hashtag and add an open licence!

You don’t need a twitter account to read @A_L_T’s tweets and to follow the #altc tag, but you do need an account if you want to retweet and comment.

And of course no ALT event would be complete without the occasional #shoetweet!

#altc #shoetweet, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell

So put our best foot forward and join us in Edinburgh and online for #altc

Joining up the dots?⤴

from NomadWarMachine

We’re all thinking about dots. Sheri reminds us that this is not a new conversation. Terry responds and starts teasing out the metaphor. Dots and lines, or overlapping circles? Maybe both, maybe more. We don’t have the words to represent to ourselves this complex conceptual scheme. (A recurring memory: in a philosophy of science lecture we are described as three dimensional slices of four dimensional space-time worms.)

Wendy sees pictures in poems. I see pictures in my head – pictures I can’t translate onto paper because they are too transient – shape shifting wisps of mental smoke that drift at the edge of my mind. Blobs of ink dropped into water – blending with others yet keeping their shape. I try to represent what I see, but I just make a mess.

We bounce ideas off each other and they ricochet off in unexpected tangents (Wendy, again). (Another memory from philosophy of science – Newton’s “billiard ball” theory of causation.) A wirearchy, not a hierarchy.

Twitter chat personas⤴

from NomadWarMachine

I’ve been thinking a lot about the different ways of interacting, or not, on Twitter this week, and I’ve come up with a rough list of types of engagement in Twitter conversations:

Academic: adds relevant academic references
Networker: links to others/brings other tweeps into the conversation
Self-publicist: always twists the conversation to talk about their work; provides links to their work over and over again
Cheerleader: RTs with added positive comments about the original post
Enthusiast: replies to say how great everybody and their ideas are
Lurker: likes posts, might RT without added comment, but does not post
Critic: disagrees, adds alternative points of view, but does so in a positive way*
Troll: no need to define these*

What do you think? Do you recognise yourself or others in this categorisation? Ha:ve I missed out any personas you’d include?

* Thanks to Len for these two

Don’t kill the messenger⤴

from NomadWarMachine

It’s no surprise to find that Jeremy Hunt is talking rubbish again this week. In a Guardian article we hear that he is proposing a universal social media limit for every child. Sound good? Maybe – except that there’s no evidence to suggest that this policy is necessary.

Politicians – pfff. Not worth wasting typing time on. But there’s an undercurrent here (of course) about controlling the masses, and I suspect Hunt and his cronies are trying to attempt to control our non-state-controlled means of communication. Of course social media can be misused, but the frequent dissing of social media, and the emphasis on studies purporting to show how social media is bad for us, in one way or another, just annoy me. Social media is so important to me – it’s how I communicate, participate, and learn. I was reminded of this earlier when Verena asked the following question:

Mine looks like this today #clmooc and #ds106 mainly but the others as well pic.twitter.com/7DPSrJifmk

— Sarah Honeychurch (@NomadWarMachine) April 26, 2018

Like anything else, it depends how it’s used. But don’t kill the messenger if you find others using it badly. For some of us, it is our community, our affinity space, our home.

Credit where credit is due on #PedagooFriday⤴

from Lynne

You’re probably aware of our end-of-the-week hashtag #PedagooFriday. The idea is to create a space on Twitter where teachers can share a positive experience from their classroom and, perhaps, develop a happier tone at the end of the week. It’s been quite a week. Nuff said. As this week’s Duty Moderator, I noticed that several […]

Tolerant no more⤴

from Christine McIntosh @ blethers

I haven't been blogging much recently - short form social media has been bad for me; it makes communication easy and brief. But I've been driven back here by a meeting at the weekend, and the memories it stirred. The meeting was about Mission, and the memories involved me, blogging when it was The Thing, and the scorn heaped on any such thing by most of the church people outside the orbit of the Provost of St Mary's Glasgow.

I exaggerate, of course - always one for the soundbite. However, I'm not about the exaggerate now. We'd been discussing Mission - the hows, the who, the strategies. We'd argued the finer points of pew-removal, and whether this was A Good Thing. We'd talked about town-centre churches and churches stuck up a hill in the back of beyond; we'd pondered the desirability of holding discussions in a pub rather than in church after a service. It had been borne in on me anew that if the committed in any congregation are unable to demonstrate why they go to church by the way they refer to it, to what goes on there, and make it sound fun, frankly, then I wouldn't be tempted to visit. (I use the word "fun" loosely, you understand, for "fun" can encompass much - but it involves a spark however you find it).

There was also this business of language. (I'll get on to the blogging connection, I promise, but I'm started now ...) I suspect we're all a bit different in our reactions to the different language we use to discuss our religious experience. I'm turned off by a great deal of traditional evangelical terminology myself; I can see it's helpful to other people but it makes me run a mile. So we have to gauge our audience and communicate accordingly - and if that means I often speak about religion in rather unexpected language then that's fine. I've spent my working life sizing up my audiences (classes, if you didn't know - classes of adolescents) and making my subject matter accessible and interesting, and I've transferred that to any sharing of religious experience now. I reckon self-awareness is tied up with that - do we ever objectively consider how we come across to people?

And then there's social media. (Told you I'd get here). There are still people who "don't do social media" - and they say it as if there was a bad smell under their noses. Most of them are not exactly young, but it's surely more important to be youthful in our willingness to use whatever is available to make life easier? How on earth do you share anything with people who are (a) under 60 (b)total strangers (c)not exactly strangers but not intimate acquaintances, if you refuse to have anything to do with the vehicle through which they conduct an increasing amount of their social life?

And do you know something? I'm no longer prepared to allow that the people who react like this have a right to their own opinions. If that's how they feel about it, perhaps they ought to consider themselves out of the game, as far as Mission is concerned. If that's how our church is seen, it will die.

Happily, there are people who are not leaving the table (I'm hooked on Leonard Cohen's latest album just now, and it's supplying a soundtrack to this) - and some of them have been running the church, and some of them are prominent social media figures, and the interaction they engender by online discussion in popular forums (or should I stick to fora?) involves far more than just the members of the club. Now, at Synod, people are reminded of the power of social media and asked to tweet civilly - a change from the days when it was de rigeur to scoff at the silly names of the platforms instead. I've been scoffed at publicly in the past - but not any more.

So can we have the next generation of missionaries (shall I call them that?) who will incorporate the use of social media into their talk as naturally as they used to talk about coffee mornings? And maybe, for the people who would prefer the latter, a deliberate policy of education to enable them to continue to be effective?

But why bother writing all this? If you read it, you're using social media anyway. I'm preaching to the choir. But maybe it's just because I want to be less tolerant, and my own blog is a place to do it...