J’aime les nuages … les nuages qui passent … là-bas … là-bas … les merveilleux nuages!
C. Baudelaire: L’étranger

Bill posted about a cool site that creates a word cloud (’word clouds’ and ‘tag clouds’ are different beasts) for your tweets.

I have no idea what to make of mine, based on 100 tweets over three months:

I think I can see evidence that I’m using it for acknowledgement (”thanks”), comment (”nice”) and maybe dialogue too (”sian” appears in my word cloud as an addressee). A couple of bits of technology appear – Prezi and WebCT – but both as objects of frustration (”feeling” and “cross” are in the cloud). Twitter as spleen-venting tool perhaps?

I can see some of the topics that have caught my interest – “field” “community”, “picture”, “visual” etc.. There’s no “uncanny” or “ghosts”.

There are no elephants in my cloud which is a shame as is my hunch that, good as it is, it hasn’t really caught how I’ve been engaging in the course via Twitter.

Given this course’s boundary-busting characteristics, I’m going to carry on in a similar mode and discuss my assessment 2 ideas in public. Sian – hope that’s ok?

I think I’m only really going to finish the course if I produce something that connected to my current professional practice. For IDEL a couple of years back I did something completely unconnected (We have never been digital) and suffered for it in spite of finding the experience intellectually stimulating.

So, I think I’d like to write something on a small Twitter project I’m leading. It’s got a some funding from LearnHigher and I’m going to need to produce an evaluation in March or April 2010. It would be nice to do some work on it now.

How would it fit the themes of the module?

Well, I think discourse on Twitter exemplifies the utopian and dystopian narratives that characterise the reception of new technologies. It is, alternatively, ‘perfect for the always on/always on you tech-savvy digital native’ as well as  ‘another sign of HE going to hell in a hand cart as yet another faddish tool is used to further degrade students’ writing skills, attention spans and cognitive abilities’.

My  project is also interested in the ways  Twitter might support the development of  learning communities through:

• the public posting of questions, comments and reflections (quasi-lifestream)
• resource sharing
• dialogue (student-to-student, student-to-lecturer)

One of my projects is working well and there could be some interesting analysis of the interactions taking place. However, another is a complete failure and I want to interview a sample of the 90 + students to explore why Twitter doesn’t work for them. Privately the module leader and I are actually quite cross with them (why don’t they get it – they’re doing media audience studies for chrissakes!) but publicly we’re interested in understanding the dissonance between staff and student conceptualisations of Twitter.

Finally, part of me is interested in exploring the use of Twitter on this course as well; there were some interesting comments on Twitter’s lack of suitability to dialogue (140 character limit but also disrupted turn adjacency issues).

All comments gratefully received.

I’m going to have to block in some time to summarise and comment on some of the interesting reflections that have emerged as a result of our MSc Twitter experiment.

There have been a few comments about 140 characters being insufficient. I wonder if this isn’t missing the point of Twitter though? Maybe Twitter’s strength is the way it enables what I’m going to call “ambient collegiality”.

This idea is partially based on Leisa Reichelt’s notion of ambient intimacy:

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight. (Reichelt 2007)

More recently, Guy Merchant has contested the view that Twitter’s function is only phatic and coined the phrase ‘ambient sociablity’:

Ambience seems to catch the sense of lightweight contact that typifies microblogging, and sociability leaves it open to both the level of friendship and the sort of exchanges that are transacted. (Merchant 2009)

In the context of a course like this, or of my use of Twitter for professional networking, I like the idea of ambient collegiality: being able to know what my peers are reading, writing about, reflecting on in nearly-now, almost real-time. They can share conference calls for papers, invitations for project funding, jobs, new software, relevant news. It’s a distributed senior common room without coffee.

References

Merchant, G. (2009). Ambient sociability. My Vedana. Retrieved May 20, 2009, from http://myvedana.blogspot.com/2009/05/ambient-sociability.html

Reichelt, L. (2007). Ambient Intimacy. Disambiguity. Retrieved October 8 2009, from http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/

I’ve not read a thing yet – I’ll have more time Wednesday and Thursday – but already the choice of technology used on the course is provoking reflection.

I like Sian and colleagues’ brave experiments in getting us to rethink learning technology by not just talking the talk but walking the walk (on a tightrobe with no safety net as sezpayne2 noted).  So, no WebCT Panopticon and instead we have a combination of:

• centralising technologies like the course team’s module blog (the mothership?) providing us with course readings, structure and instructions (most academics use the VLE as a content repository – why don’t they use a blog instead?)
• dispersed technologies like the course participants’ sites – their WordPress blogs and Twitter accounts for personal reflections

Thoughts on a metaphor about some technologies being centripetal (pulling learners together) and others centrifugal (pulling them away). Has it been done? Does it make sense?

Anyway, will course participants comment on one another’s posts  or reply to them in posts on their  own blogs? Will we have conversations in Twitter or broken monologic fragments? Will we use old skool discussion boards? In short, will Sian and Jen pull it off or will it end in tears?