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.