Tuesday 27 November 2012

A high-risk Twitter experiment



Just one of the strategies for the Learning2014 project (described in the last blogpost) is to provide opportunities for staff to have the experiences we are planning for our students. This post describes one such experience.

At the end of each year, the Vice-Chancellor hosts an all-day Senior Managers Forum which often involves groupwork (which many dread). This year, I was invited to lead a session on “The Future of Higher Education in the world of MOOCs” and decided to use a high-risk strategy of asking attendees to use Twitter within their groupwork. I am told there was a reasonably high level of angst about this across the university.

In the lead-up,  I gave a demonstration to the Senior Executive on how to set up a twitter account, how to participate, and so on. We ran introductory classes for others on 2 different occassions, but attendance was fairly low. 

In preparation for collating the responses to the groupwork, I posted the following tweet:

Is there an App that will produce a diagram of keywords from tweets with a common #hashtag? #cfhe12

I received a number of suggestions and reviewed them all, but ultimately decided to use the following tools.

I set up screens around the venue to display the general hashtag tweets for the forum using two different tools:
http://cloud.li/    produced a tag cloud, and
http://visibletweets.com produced a colourful animation of individual tweets with the option to display as a tag cloud

This worked reasonably well, and there was polite interest J in them.

The really big pay-off was in the use of Twitter to collect feedback from the two groupwork activities. Each activity had a focus question to which they were asked to respond using a dedicated hashtag. I then used
http://www.infomous.com/  to display a tag cloud for the responses (one of which is displayed in the header). At the podium, I could click on a particular keyword response and display all the tweets related to that word.

For the only time I can remember, the groupwork activities received the greatest praise for the day both in verbal comments, and in the following tweets:

Participants not groaning about groupwork. Lively debate on game changing or not #smfuts12_gc

Table engaged in f2f conversation and connected learning - sharing app

Kudos to senior managers at UTS - leading by example through #smfuts12 twitter stream. Making the future happen!

There was even a tweet from someone external to the university:

Loving the soc.media leadership & livetweets coming from #smfuts12 - UTS event w/snr managers. #research #strategy #transparency

So, thank you to everyone who sent suggestions on the best tools to use. They really helped make the day a big success in terms of demonstrating the value of the use of tools such as Twitter that many had previously thought to be of little value. It also dramatically improved the experience of groupwork – so many people commented that they felt their voice was not lost in the ‘group reportback'.

And finally, the majority of those who joined Twitter specifically for the event, continue to use it.

Towards Learning2014



Never has the phrase “May you live in interesting times” been more relevant to my role than this year – UTS is in the middle of spending over a $1Billion on its campus redevelopment  just as the explosion of free, online learning occurs.  Just a few weeks ago Minister Chris Evans was quoted in the Financial Review (3 Oct) as questioning “whether the government should continue to fund university infrastructure as higher education moves online at a rapid pace.” To say there was a level of anxiety in the higher education sector would be an understatement. But, as I said in my article in The Conversation, “any university that can be replaced by a MOOC, should be”. This blog explores why I think UTS won’t be replaced, and how we are achieving that.

So far the following campus redevelopment projects have been completed: new student housing (720 beds); a multi-purpose sports hall; a major refurbishment of our Great Hall; a new space for the conduct of short courses; and major redevelopment of teaching spaces in our faculty of Design, Architecture & Building.

But the biggest changes are yet to come. There are three new buildings in the process of construction: The Faculty of Engineering and IT Building on Broadway (made famous yesterday when the large crane caught fire and the jib collapsed); the new Business School (designed by Frank Gehry); and a new Science Building.

The first two buildings have been designed (long before the MOOC hysteria) to maximise opportunities for collaborative learning – there is not a single standard lecture theatre in either of the buildings – rather there are large collaborative spaces.

This poses the significant challenge of how to change the learning experience of students, so they experience the best of online and face-to-face learning opportunities. We are meeting these challenges through two projects: Learning2014 (the year we will occupy the new buildings) and Learning2020.

Learning2014 is concerned with changing teaching and learning practices to make best use of these new collaborative spaces. Learning2020 is a longer term project to make the necessary changes to larger systems for this change in learning to occur - for example timetabling and other IT systems.

This blog will discuss these initiatives - the successes and failures :)