The CETIS conference (http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Conference_2009_Programme) is run by the JISC Centre For Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, and attracts many people from the E-learning community. It took place at Aston on 10th and 11th November 2009, attracting 146 delegates according to the open list on the conference website.
Over the period that the conference had been mentioned (from the afternoon of Nov 5th up till midnight on Nov 12th) 566 tweets were sent by 89 separate contributors. The large majority of these (440, 78%) were sent during the conference sessions, with 255 (45%) on the first day and 185 (33%) on the second day. Outside the conference hours, 32 (5%) were sent in the break between the two days of the conference, 57 (10%) were sent before the start of the conference and 37 (7%) were sent after the end of the last session.
How many of these tweets are merely "backchat" or "electronic gossip" and how many of them are broadcasting helpful information? I used the twitter API to download all the tweets and individually categorised them as "informational" or not. An informational tweet contains some information about the conference that is useful to an external viewer (a non-delegate such as myself). It may contain a quote from a speaker, a URL to a relevant resource, or a brief (microsummary) of an issue raised. By contrast, an example of a non-informational tweet may be a complaint about the wireless network, a comment about the quality of the food or a message of thanks to the organisers. This categorisation requires some judgement on my behalf, but the criteria are resonably straightforward and repeatable.
The distribution of tweets over time can be seen in the following figure (click to see a bigger version), which also shows how the number of "informational" tweets (red) compares to the total number of tweets (blue). In total, 324 tweets (57%) were in the informational category.
During the conference sessions, the informational tweets account for most of the Twitter activity (307, 70%). In other words, the effort expended in twittering during conference sessions is not wasteful and distracting effort from engaging with the conference agenda. It is mainly valuable to an outside observer - which I would claim extends the impact and influence of the conference beyond the cohort of local delegates. Of course, this works best if the tweets can refer (and link) to a rich set of online resources to direct observers to.
Back to my obsession with showing that Twitter isn't just an electronic stream of gossip - the figure on the left shows how people break down into different Twitter categories: those who only twitter useful information (or did on this occasion), those who never twitter useful information (not useful to me anyway) and those who mainly or partly twitter useful information (those whose information rating were more or less than 50%).
But those who stick strictly to the facts don't provide the biggest chunk of information. This figure on the left shows the contribution of the various groups of twitterers to the total information content of the tweets: most of the useful twitter information is provided by people who mix "information" and "comment".
So perhaps I shouldn't get too worried by the criticism that Twitter is full of people telling us what they have for breakfast and what happened on their trip to work. Perhaps it is precisely those kinds of people who are more likely to let us all know what the key themes are emerging from that high profile conference that we couldn't attend.
Hi Les,
ReplyDeleteInteresting analysis, as, I suspect, one of your mostly informational tweeters I think conference coverage and 'broadcasting' are one place where twitter shines. We (CETIS) explicitly strive for 'amplification' effect as part of our use of twitter during the conference. Both to expand the conference audience but also to increase the interaction at the conference and allow different forms of participation.
What was challenging this year was that the wifi at the conference venue fell over completely - so those tweets during the conference sessions are nearly entirely via phones or 3G connections. As such the volume of traffic was significantly lower than the previous year. And more importantly fewer people at the conference were reading the back chat.
We noticed this in the OER technical roundtable session - the year before in the OER scoping session we had a significant element of particiption in the session from people not at the conference via cover-it-live and twitter. This year this was largely lacking.
We also noticed the wifi loss reduced interaction between sessions - we'd expected the 'linked data' and the 'find and seek' sessions to interact via twitter.
Hopefully we'lll avoid those particular gremlins next year, but it's good to see that the conference still managed an online presence.
It's worth noting that this conference had very poor wireless so I would suggest that those people tweeting were primarily those who could do so over their own 3G network (iPhones, 3G dongles, etc.). I don't think that would change the balance of usage much but I suppose it might do.
ReplyDeleteApart from "following" a conference tag as you describe, I also find Twitter useful when people I "follow" re-tweet something interesting from beyond my usual ken. I try to do this in my turn, eg a recent re-tweet from the eResearch Australasia conference, which most of those I'm involved with over here may know little about.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I have is a (set of) standing Twitter searches. The most comprehensive is (digital OR data) AND (curation OR preservation). This is demonstrably flaky and intermittent, but does bring me to interesting resources I would never otherwise have found, at very little effort to me.
My final example is that when I get involved with or start to think about something, I'm likely to do a Twitter search. During a workshop on Provenance, this uncovered a paper on provenance that was being delivered at the exact same time somewhere across the globe!
So on balance I am very convinced it is useful. (And watching Paul Walk cringe as his football team is beaten yet again, can be funny too!)