Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 Introduction
Since Tim O’Reilly [14] announced for the very first time the term Web 2.0 and
described a new way to dealing with the WorldWideWeb, a dramatically change
happened. Users working nowadays completely different, instead of mainly con-
suming information from static webpages, they play an active role, they con-
tribute, discuss and share information around the globe. Since then Social Net-
works and Social Communities are growing rapidly and aim to connect people
with same interests to enhance their daily life as well as working processes.
Stephen Downes [5] also mentioned that “Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technol-
ogy - This means there is no technological revolution, it is a social revolution”
and pointed out the importance for learning and teaching, named e-Learning 2.0.
Especially in Technology Enhanced Learning lot of research has been carried out
to foster the use of Weblogs, Wikis, Podcasts and further popular applications [4,
3, 20, 7] and to improve students’ learning behaviors. However, if we take a look
to all this great research results it can be stated that there is a great potential
by introducing Web 2.0 applications to the classroom. Furthermore emerging re-
search on the use of Mash-Ups [12], Personal Learning Environments [18], Open
Educational Resources and the use of mobile technologies for learning purposes
2 Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt
give a promising future forecast. Without any doubt it does not matter if it
is called e-learning, m-Learning or even u-Learning (ubiquitous learning) [22]
the influence of technology will increase. On the one hand it can be concluded
that researchers did a lot of work to improve the daily education, but on the
other hand there are nearly no work about how such technologies can help the
researchers themselves. As Erik Duval announced on the workshop homepage
the main question we have to deal with “How could we make use of science2.0
opportunities for Technology Enhanced Learning researchers? ” [6]. In this pub-
lication the authors will concentrate about how the micro-blogging tool Twitter
can be used on scientific conferences for e-Learning scientists by presenting a
practical example. After a short introduction, the real life setting is explained
and statistical data presented.
Twitter is the most famous, best known and also the very first micro-blogging
platform. Micro-blogging can be seen as a new form of blogging activity and is
described by Templeton [19] as a small-scale form of blogging, generally made
up of short, succinct messages, used by both consumers and businesses to share
news, post status updates and carry on conversations. Owyang [15] describes the
difference between blogs and micro-blogs as follows: [...] long form blog posts
like this seem so much slower and plodding compared to how quickly information
can come and go in Twitter. [...] Information within Microblogging communities
[...] encourage rapid word of mouth – of both positive and negative content. In a
nutshell, micro-blogging offers a platform for the fast exchange of thoughts, ideas
and artefacts. It must be pointed out that each message cannot be longer than
a maximum of 140 characters and can put on the web easily. These messages,
so-called tweets, can be public or private, can be directed to one or more Twitter
users (identified by the @ sign) and can deal with certain topics (identified by
the # sign). By using a hashtag in tweets it is easy to aggregate all tweets
dealing with the same topic. People who are following anyone are able to read
these tweets, are able to reply or to contact the author directly. However, the
strength of this new communication and collaboration platform is that sending
and reading messages is not restricted to a web interface, it can be done also
by numerous desktop applications as well as by mobile phones. Latest statistical
data pointed out that only “only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter
website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smart
phones or computers” [2].
Communities in Twitter are forming through the usage of a common tag that
is part of the message. The CoPs on Twitter deal with brands (e.g. #apple), ed-
ucational courses (e.g. #wekm09), conferences (e.g. #edmedia) or world-shaking
events like mass riots (e.g. #iranelection). By taking a closer look to Twitter it
becomes quite useful for the fast information exchange among a community of
practice. Dealing with these ideas, that micro-blogging allows us to share, dis-
cuss and collaborate online, Twitter was introduced to different scientific confer-
Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community 3
ences. A very first experiment at ED-MEDIA Conference 2008 pointed out that
the Twitter stream can be used to display posts during the keynote speech [8]
just in time. Further research also shows how people are using Twitter during
conferences by carrying out short surveys [17]. In this publication we like to
concentrate on practical experiences and point out how Twitter performs during
a live event.
During the storage of new tweets all occurring tags are saved and associated
with the respective users as to make statistical statements later on. In order to
make these claims about the usage of Twitter and the dynamics of the commu-
nication, we implemented a script that saves statistical data like the number of
tweets or users that used the tag on a daily basis. Furthermore we used the Ya-
hoo Term Extraction Web Service (TEWS)5 to extract the most relevant terms
or phrases from the content of the tweets. The TEWS returns a sorted list of
relevant terms and phrases, which represent the core of the daily conversation.
The main task of the twitterVisBT application is to track the changes within
a community on Twitter (size of the community, members, other tags used,
important terms and phrases) or for a single monitored user. Our visualization
is not useful for the use as live stream of communication. There are various other
tools, which are specialized to do so. In order to make statistical claims about
the use of Twitter as a mean of communication it is sufficient to update the data
set once per hour or even once per day.
Figure 2 shows a section of the statistical part of the application. In part 2(a)
it is pictured who are the main contributors to the communication in the Twitter
channel. that way it becomes obvious that the users @mebner and @walthern
were the most active users of the community and accounted for around 24% of
5
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V2/termExtraction.html, last
visited August 2009
Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community 5
the overall communication on Twitter. Figure 2(b) shows other tags that have
been used together with the community-identifying tag #edmedia. From that it
is noticeable that the Top 10 of other tags used can be classified in two groups:
firstly location- and travel-related tags (e.g. #honolulu, #TravelToEdMedia)
and secondly tags related to the themes of the conference (e.g. #HigherEd,
#elearning, #mlearning).
(a) Visualizing users that employed the (b) Other tags that have been used to-
tag #edmedia gether with #edmedia
Fig. 2. Visualizing users and other tags used with the tag #edmedia
Besides the statistical data we try to extract and visualize the most important
terms and phrases from the daily tweets. The twitterVisBT tool holds a tab that
visualizes the most important terms from the communication on Twitter in order
to trace the centers of attention. Therefore we are using a simple word cloud
that shows the more important words larger than the less important. Under the
visualization there is a slider wherewith one can go back in time to see the data
from the past. Furthermore there is a play button that allows to automatically
browse through the daily summaries of the tweets sent6 . Figure 3 shows two
dynamic word cloud extracted from the tweets containing the hashtag #edmedia.
Figure 3(a) show the extracted terms for 2009-06-24. Stephen Downes gave his
keynote entitled “Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment”
on that day and talked about media innovations and how social networks can
be incorporated in a PLE. Furthermore he talked about required technological
skills and the use of media to close the gap between learners. Figure 3(a) clearly
represents the wide discussions on the keynote in the Twitter backchannel, but
also names of speakers (Erik Duval) or local places (molokai) can be identified
from the tag cloud. The shown keywords have to be regarded with respect to the
context where they emerged. For example, only because the two terms “Erik”
“Duval” appear, it does not mean that these terms are relevant at all. Only in
6
For the ED-MEDIA 2009 there is a video of this automatic browsing available at
http://bit.ly/YfGiK.
6 Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt
the context of the time, when the terms appeared most and the location indicate
the relevance.
The key terms for 2009-06-25 show the phrase bytestander effect as very
important. Nancy White posted a link on the topic and gained a lot of retweets,
what made this topic so important. The terms social loafing and social acts
belong to a keynote of Richard Schwier entitled “Pursuing the elusive metaphor
of community in virtual learning environments”.
4 Discussion
Our research in [17] shows that the scientific community started to incorporate
Twitter as important tool for communicating and exchanging thoughts, resources
and continuative links. If we take a closer look to the scientific value of the
Twitter use at the ED-MEDIA conference, than we have to separate between two
major parts – on the one hand there are statistical data which allows a detailed
interpretation of trends, trend-setters or important topics. On the other hand
also the question ”For which purpose Twitter was used during the conference? ”
occurs. It can be stated that Twitter was used in following different ways:
References
1. The twitter experiment – bringing twitter to the classroom at ut dallas. http://
kesmit3.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-experiment-bringing-twitter-to.
html, April 2009.
2. C. Arthur. Average twitter user has 126 followers, and only 20% of users
go via website. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/29/
twitter-users-average-api-traffic, June 2009.
3. N. Augar, R. Raitman, and W. Zhou. Teaching and learning online with wikis. In
R. Atkinson, C. McBeath, D. Jonas-Dwyer, and R. Phillips, editors, Beyond the
comfort zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference, pages 95–104, 2004.
8 Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt