twitter

Researching Digital Education: the socio-material and interdisciplinary ‘grids of analysis’

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social network

This is my presentation on innovative approaches to researching informal digital learning for the Scottish Education Research Association conference in Edinburgh in November 2019. This paper presents an innovative research approach to examining learning in professional learning communities on Twitter. The research approach draws on a socio-material ontology and assemblage theory (Law 2004) to engage … Read more

Identity work in an online professional community

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As a nice start to the New Year I have an article published in Human Resource Development International on professional identity and identity-work in open online communities. The article is available here and the abstract reads: Defining Human Resource Development (HRD) as either a scholarly domain or field of practice is widely recognised as problematic. This article investigates … Read more

Social Media Analytics – research question

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My topic is mapping a controversy in higher education in the UK. The controversy centres on the Open University (but does have wider implications) and the particular challenges around financial sustainability it faces and related to the appointment of Peter Horrocks as Vice Chancellor back in 2015. This all came to a head in early … Read more

PhD handed in!

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The minor amendments have been completed, the thesis has been printed and bound and handed in! I’m now starting on drafting papers from the thesis but meanwhile, here’s the final abstract: Distributed online discussion events in social media are increasingly used as sites for open, informal professional development, knowledge sharing and community formation. Synchronous chat … Read more

The Twitter Experience

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For all the structuring effects of the Twitter functional features, the Twitter experience is generally perceived as a private one as only the individual user can see their Twitter feed, as they have structured it, on their particular screen configuration (Gillen and Merchant 2013). This aspect of the individualisation and heterogeneity of public and open … Read more

Open online spaces of professional learning: searching for understanding  the ‘material’ of Twitter discussion events

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Here are the slides from my presentation to the Social Informatics cluster group meeting of 13 June 2014. Abstract: Recent years have seen a growth in micro-blogging discussion events intended to support professional learning (McCulloch, et al, 2011; Bingham and Conner, 2010) communities. These events often take place on Twitter and are open to anyone … Read more

Digital Scholarship day of ideas: data [2]

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This is the second session of the day I wanted to note in detailed (the first is here). The session it Robert Procter on Big Data and the sociological imagination, Professor of social informatics at the University of Warwick. These notes are written live from the live stream. So here we go: The title has changed … Read more

Twitter “ain’t all that”

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A useful reminder that Twitter Should Not Be Your Only Communications Channel in organising and promoting events for the following reasons: Firstly, not everyone is on Twitter. Wouldn’t have thought this point needed made, but apparently it does. Secondly, not everyone follows the right people on Twitter. This applies doubly if you are organising an event … Read more

A model of discussion events on Twitter

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As previously discussed here & here, I am studying two Twitter discussion events as sites of professional identity formation and development. The broad structure of the two events is broadly similar to the research process of a Tweetstorm: “an online, open brainstorm-like session via Twitter” (Sie, Bitter-Rijpkema, and Sloep 2009: 60). A Tweetstorm was described as a … Read more

Social Network Analysis and Digital Data Analysis

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Notes on a presentation by Pablo Paredes. The abstract for the seminar is: This presentation will be about how to make social network analysis from social media services such as Facebook and Twitter. Although traditional SNA packages are able to analyse data from any source, the volume of data from these new services can make … Read more