Year: 2009

Twitter as Search Engine or Community Seed

Photo by choconancyThe folks over at BrandonHall, the learning folks who blog lots of interesting links, pointed out a value of Twitter that not all of us may have seen yet. Twitter as a search engine. This was interesting to me because I’m co-leading a short online workshop introducing social media in a global international development network. The question always comes up “why would we be interested in something like Twitter. One application I try to show is Twitter as social listening. But I never really conceptualized it as search.   So I thought I’d put it to the test.

First, I searched for something for me. Chocolate, of course. But you have to have a question in mind to make the search meaningful beyond curiosity. I wanted to get a sense of how many people were tweeting about chocolate, and if their tweets were about their obsession, or if there was valuable information about chocolate flying around the tweetosphere. (Is that a word?)

Well, the answer is yes and yes. The first page of results were from tweets that happened within a two minute time frame. LOTS of volume. For example, flamingo_punk Wrote: “Mmmm! Chocolate mini-wheats rock my socks.” There were lots of passionate chocolate tweets like this. On the information side I found:

  • SavingEveryday: Off to work! I leave you with this: An ounce of chocolate contains about 20 mg of caffeine…
  • recr: @MortgageChick They say it takes 21 days for a ‘change’ to become a habit. try subing coffee or lattes with hot chocolate. worked for me.
  • 2chaos: NYSE commentator: “If the last depression brought innovation, like thechocolate chip cookie, I hope this gives us more than the snuggie” Ha 
That last one bolstered my outlook of the current economic situation. Ha! is right! But chocolate is a wide ranging topic so using Twitter to search and listen would give you many results and you could aggregate that information to watch trends on a topic quickly. 
So what happens when I search for a narrower topic that might be of interest to my workshop colleagues, such as “climate change” or “agricultural research?”
Climate change gave me on the first page a lot of links and serious tweets about the issue. Clearly, climate change advocates have taken up tweeting. Note the twitter names — they are using their twitter IDs as a part of the communication issues strategy. It is like a breaking news ticker. The volume of tweets on this topic (the first page of returns were all posts within 15 minutes) indicates this may be a very useful “social listening” resource for organizations working on climate change. 
I thought agricultural research might be a bit thinner. I was wrong.  But the timing is much different. The links on the first search page were between 1 and 20 days ago, but they were far more focused than the wide ranging chocolate tag. Interestingly, I knew about 20% of the tweeters on the first two pages — it is a much smaller network. There were also tweet replies @ users within the first two pages, showing connections between those tweeters.  So I start to wonder, is there an audience for agricultural research tweets yet? Is it in the growth phase while chocolate may be overwhelming in the amount of ongoing tweets?
All in all, this 25 minute exercise told me a lot about Twitter as a social listening tool. For me, watching a twitter search stream over time is a form of scanning one subset of the world and what it is thinking about that topic. I am not quite as clear about how searching Twitter as a one-off search can pay off. The time frame is so short, or if you want to go longer, you have to awkwardly search back through page after page of tweets. It is not yet easy. If you captured the stream via an RSS feed and than analyzed it later as a search, that might be easier.
Still, I’m fascinated by the listening site. Watching tweets can tell me about both what people are tweeting, but more interesting to me from a work perspective, is who is tweeting about a topic and how connected tweeters are around a topic.  Is a Twitter topic a seed for a new community?   Can a community or a network emerge around a shared tweeting topic like it can around a social bookmarking tag? Is a trend of tweets a community  indicator? It certainly is when people use a hashtag to tweet event or topic related tweets. 
How would a community technology steward use Twitter? Would they want to encourage some sort of community usage of keywords or tags? Would they want to go more focused with a hashtag? Ah, but now I’m roaming far outside of my initial “twitter as search” question. See how tantalizing this is?
Do you use Twitter as a search engine? If yes, how is it working out for you?

P.S. Edited in later — some additional Twitter Search resources, thanks to all you fab commentors. I’ll keep coming back and editing them in. 

CoP Series #5: Is my community a community of practice?

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I wrote for Darren Sidnick. I am finally getting the rest of the series up. Part 1, part 2, part 3,, part 4, part 5, part 6,  part 7 ,  part 8 , part 9 and  part 1o  are all here on the blog.

Many people get worried about making sure their group is a CoP. They ask “How would I know? Does it matter?”

In our first post on Communities of Practice (CoPs) we disabused ourselves of the confusion between a community and the platform that allows a community to interact together online. In this post, let’s wrestle with what a CoP isn’t, and if that really matters anyway. This may also give us insight as to what we are trying to do and perhaps point to a different strategic option when trying to support and extend learning. After all, as much as I think CoPs are amazing, they are not the only thing we have at hand.

  • Is a “class” or “cohort of learners” a community? It might be. If the group continues to learn after the course is over, the course then becomes the catalyst for the beginnings of the community. That said, we can take a “community perspective” when we design a course which would place an emphasis on interaction and making meaning of the material between students. An example might be to have the learners apply their learnings “out in the world” then come back and report on what they learned, questions they had and, if relevant, how application changed their understanding of the material. By doing this WITH others, they get feedback and other perspectives. Often Ufi learndirect learners are working individually through content. So that would suggest the community may be something offered alongside the course. The content also matters – some things lend themselves more to a community model than others. Context matters!
  • Is a group of people who all took a specific elearning offering – at any time, alone or together, a CoP? They could be! When we think about the value of learning, and measuring learning that stays with us, we often think about learning applied in use. So if I use that math in my job and do my job better, or I become a better manager because I have a basic grasp of change management. Application, as noted above, always depends on context, so providing space for cohorts or anyone who has taken a specific course to come back and clarify, ask and answer questions can be a very productive learning environment.
  • Is a team a CoP? Not usually. Teams are focused on an outcome of a task. CoPs are focused on the learning about how to do that task. That said, many teams have a CoP component to their work as a way to continue learning, improving and innovating. Again, if we take a community perspective on our team work, we would include processes and time for learning while doing!
  • Is a CoP the same thing as a (social) network? There is often some overlap. A network is the collection of connections and relationships between people. Right now, “social networking sites” such as Facebook and Meebo are all the rage. They can be useful tools for communities of practice, but they aren’t the same thing. The line between a community and a network is fuzzy in terms of membership, but the difference between a community of practice and a network is that the CoP is interested not just in the connections or relationships, but in the domain and practice. We’ll talk more about the important dynamic between communities and networks in a subsequent post.
  • Is a CoP the group of people who generate content on a website? That is one thing CoPs can do. Some communities have a strong orientation towards creating content that reflects their learning and their domain. For example, writing down/recording/drawing what we know helps us solidify and share the learning. But few communities just create content. The interaction in learning and creating is as important as the artifacts they create. So setting up a site for user generated content can support a CoP, but it is not THE CoP itself.
  • Is a portal a CoP? No. A portal is a website that brings together content and often tools for people to interact. So it has the domain of a CoP. But remember, a community is the people, not the tool. So if you have created a portal, you need to think about how to nurture the interaction between the people. That suggests facilitation, mentoring and other actions that stimulate interaction. The old “build it and they will come” rarely comes true. Portals, however, can be fantastic repositories for content created by a community (or many communities).

In an e-learning context (the context for this series when it was first written for Ufi ), it might be useful to share a few examples and test our understanding of them as CoPs… or not!

Message boards don’t automatically become CoPs
Between 2000-2007 message boards and chat rooms were provided within Ufi’s Learner Management system (called the LSE). These tools can support the conversational aspects of communities. But there has to be a spark. Here is the story Darren shared with me.

“In the initial implementation, there were no community facilitators or educational practitioner driving use whether on a local basis within centres (in Ufi lerndirect speak called the “tutor”) or a national basis. No-one had been mentored or trained to be a “bee,” mentor, coach or friend (more of this in a later blog). There was no guidance on what the message board/chat room was for. Surprise, surprise no-one was using it! In 2007 UFI removed this functionality.”

This is an example of having some missing “legs” for community. Yes, there was the “domain” of the course. But there was no defined community because learners were working solo with no specific path for building relationships and no facilitation for both the socialization and interactive learning conversations. So practice was missing as well. So the question remains, can web based conversational community strategies mix with Learndirect’s elearning “at any pace, any time, any place.” Can learning cohorts be built?

Some domains lend themselves to CoPs
One of the amazing things I’ve seen in CoPs is how well some types of professions are culturally so well suited to a community of practice way of being. Public health nurses in the United States (not sure about the UK!) have a practice that is all about sharing learning with each other and with their clients. Teachers who are isolated in their classrooms often have a hunger to interact and learn from other teachers. One of Ufi Learndirect’s audiences, childcare providers, is another one of those “natural” domains. In 2008 Ufi learndirect is starting a CoP pilot around Childcare.

Darren shared this information with me, which reinforces this idea that some domains are ripe for using a community approach.

“In Childcare a portal has been developed (this will go live in autumn 2008). It is for childcare professionals whether new to the professional or experienced. It is both a portal of resources (just in time training and information) to the more formal vocational qualifications (called NVQs in the UK). We hope to develop an active CoP in childcare as research has shown that childcare professionals do like to share with colleagues and do like to work together. It is a sector based approach so there is a common tie there (quite a bit of learndirect content is generic across sectors where it is felt harder to develop a community). If the Childcare Pilot is successful, Ufi will look to develop CoPs further”.

These two examples help us see that we have to look at conditions that enable CoPs.

So now that we’ve looked at these different forms, what do you think? In your context, is a CoP what you need, or something else? Share your story in the comments!

Want some more examples of communities of practice in an elearning context? Here are a few:

Dave Snowden on Rendering Knowledge

Dave Snowden has updated his principles on “Rendering Knowledge” on Cognitive Edge  These are worth reblogging. I encourage you to go in and read the full post for all the context. I have added a few comments of my own in italics. I can’t resist the meanings of the word “rendering.” At the farmer’s market last week, I could by leaf suet (rendered pig fat), candles made from rendered fat, and all sorts of things that have been transformed through heat. What is the heat of knowledge sharing?

  • Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can’t make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can’t determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.  So for me in practice, this means creating conditions where people are more apt to volunteer. Or perhaps better said, recognizing those condtions. I don’t think we can always “create” them!
     
  • We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted. In practice, I’ve found the introduction of multiple modalities, especially visual and kinesthetic practices, allow us to stimulate recall better than just words – written or verbal.  This is not about flashing a slide, but using visuals in the charting of our knowledge.  I’m not sure how to describe this, but I am experiencing it a lot lately. 
     
  • In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. I suspect there are layers of cultural implications when we look at this one. Any readers with a deep knowledge of the cultural implications of knowledge sharing? 
     
  • Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information.  Some people are better at fragments than others. Does the current online environment favor global vs linear thinkers?
     
  • Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitation of success. It follows that attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is a bad thing. So we had better get more compassionate about failure if we really are going to learn, and not hide from it.
     
  • The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality. This has major consequences for knowledge management practice. All I can do is nod vigorously in agreement. 
     
  • We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

The next interesting thing would be to explore these items and see how they show up in individuals, groups and networks. The same, or variations?

Five for Water – Social Media for Change

When someone asks how ordinary people can use social media to make a change in the world, point them to this collaborative blog of how 5 girls and 4 dads went on a mission to help families in Ethiopia have access to clean water. Five for Water. A very simple blog to hold videos from their trip. This is my favorite quote. “Mom, say hi to mars and tell him to eat his food but not socks.” (Ah, dogs.) You can read the backstory here.