Periodic Fable

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

Has Twitter lost its hype with only a minority of big users?

According to a Harvard study of 300,000 users, reported by the BBC (among others) today, just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content.
I can believe it - we all know that some people tweet not only several times a day but several times an hour. It's in the nature of statistics that such prolific people will skew the data. Of course, those people are not necessarily those who post the most useful information.
We train people how to use Twitter and we're not under any illusions - for some people it will turn out to be useful, it will work for them and suit their way of working. For others it's an interesting experiment that doesn't persist, but they have to try it to find out - and that's probably why Nielsen, who also surveyed people on Twitter, found that more than 60% of (in thier case US) Twitter users fail to return the following month. The Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter update their page less than once every 74 days.
The most ridiculous bit of statistics bashing was to say that "most people only ever "tweet" once during their lifetime" - erm - that's clearly an average and I suspect there are very few who tweet once and never again!
The researchers at Harvard also stated that "Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network," but that's something I very much disagree with. I've had several mutliway conversations, and many more people who read the conversations but don't necessarily get involved. It is ostensible a one to one or one- to-many commmunication channel, but those of us who use it often have turned it into something more.

Of course, whether that usage can continue is another matter. There are many reasons why Twitter may not last as a really useful tool, not least the recent unsavoury rash of porn-touting followers. Once again a reason NEVER to auto-follow the people who follow you!
Labels: research, social networking, twitter

posted by Helen Whitehead 9:51 AM

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Wednesday, 4 February 2009

'New and extraordinary insights' at ELESIG

Rhonas Sharpe has made a couple of posts about ELESIG (one of the academic networks I manage the online space for) on her blog. She asked members what benefit they found from the experience of being a member of the community, and got some great answers:
From Esyin Chew's "I have experienced something new and extraordinary insights that have challenged my preconceptions about digital literacy and learners' experience through ELESIG.”

to Jana Dlouha's "ELESIG is the working group with great potential for changes in higher (and other) education system as it works with learners' perspective - this is not as usual as it should be! Access to this research (and meta-research, researching the ways of research itself) is available through ELESIG work - often providing free methodological and other resources."
I'm pleased too that Amanda Jefferies was able to say that "The online NING network for ELESIG has been an excellent way to keep in touch 'virtually' with other researchers into the Student Experience and to be inspired by examples of innovative practice. "

More on Rhona's blog
Labels: communities of practice, e-learning, elearning, elesig, HE, learner experience, onlne communities, Reach Further, research

posted by Helen Whitehead 12:45 PM

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Friday, 19 October 2007

Research Repositories

When the Web was new, individual researchers posted their articles, research papers, reports and other research outputs online in their own spaces: there was no systematic way to find such articles, papers and drafts. The copyright restrictions of publication often mean that researchers no longer have the right to put up the final version of the work, but, nonetheless, many still put up early drafts. On the other hand, open access publishing can also be a requirement of many grants now.

Now many institutions are creating research repositories so that the work of their staff can be easily found and accessed if it is available. A dedicated members of staff deals with the appropriate copyright permissions, and links are made through the electronic publications system to articles published online. Such repositories can never cover all work, but can clearly assist in dissemination among the academic community. By working together, best practice is developed so that searches become more uniform.

Some examples:

Dspace at MIT
MIT's online institutional repository - built to save, share, and search MIT's digital research materials
http://dspace.mit.edu/

Leicester Research Archive
A digital collection of research output from members of the University of Leicester, England, UK. It currently includes articles, book chapters, theses, reports and conference papers, and can include any form of research output including data sets. Most material is freely available in full text. If an item is not available in full, LRA will indicate this in a "stub" document.
https://lra.le.ac.uk/

Loughborough University's Institutional Repository
http://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace/

Strathprints: The University of Strathclyde Institutional Repository
http://eprints.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/

SHERPA
SHERPA is an initiative investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/

University of Birmingham - EPrints Service
University of Bristol - Bristol Repository of Scholarly Eprints (ROSE)
British Library - EPrints
University of Cambridge - http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/
University of Durham - Durham E-Print Repository
University of Edinburgh - Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA)
University of Glasgow - Glasgow ePrints Service
London LEAP Consortium
Birkbeck College - Birkbeck ePrints
Goldsmiths, University of London - Goldsmiths Eprints
Imperial College - Imperial Eprints
Kings College - King's ePrints
LSE - LSE Research Online
Royal Holloway - Royal Holloway Research Online
School of Advanced Study - SAS-SPACE
SOAS - SOAS Eprints
School of Pharmacy - Pharmacy Eprints Pilot
UCL - UCL Eprints
University of Newcastle upon Tyne - Newcastle University Library E-Print Pilot
University of Nottingham - Nottingham ePrints
University of Oxford - Oxford Eprints
White Rose Partnership - White Rose Research Online (Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, York)
Cranfield University - Cranfield QUEprints
Sheffield Hallam University - Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive
University of St Andrews - St Andrews Eprints
CCLRC - (Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils ) - CCLRC ePublication Archive

SHERPA also provides information about the copyright policies of a range of academic publishers.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/projects/sherparomeo.html

For a full list of repositories, see:

the OPENDOAR site
OpenDOAR (at the University of Nottingham) is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information: they provide a list and a search mechanism.
http://www.opendoar.org/

Possibly one of the most useful interfaces of all is this one: OPENDOAR's search interface for all the repositories in their directory:
http://www.opendoar.org/search.php
This is a trial search service for the full-text of material held in open access repositories listed in the Directory. This has been made possible through the recent launch by Google of its Custom Search Engine
Labels: institutional repositories, institutional repository, publications, repository, research, research archive, research repository

posted by Helen Whitehead 6:00 AM

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