How We Twitter

22Jan09

I’ve invited you to experiment with Twitter to give you practice in using English, to introduce the use of enhanced group communications for learning, to help prepare you for the rich and demanding communications contexts you will likely confront in the workplace, and because Twitter can help build supportive community and is fun!

Many of you have responded vigorously and well, and it has been just wonderful to see all that English being put to good use! As we discussed in some detail last week, and which I will review here, you have been using Twitter to ask and answer questions, to offer observations and express feelings, to respond to the observations and feelings of others, to share sources and links, to plan and organize activities, and to comment on all of the above.

I’d like you to think about adding some comments on your use of Twitter to your Final Presentations in the next two weeks, addressing the question of how you learned how to use Twitter to your advantage, including, how it contributed to your learning and use of English, to the development of your communications skills, to your other academic work, and to the communications among friends and community.

I’m also writing this up for my other friends in the e-learning business as I think what you are doing is exemplary and will offer them a helpful case study. So, after outlining what you’ve done and might do next, I’ll talk about the curious and maybe unique place such uses of Twitter may have in using such technologies in the classroom. I put it here so you might see a little bit of the larger picture, know a bit better why your achievement is of some significance, and maybe offer you a chance to develop your understanding in greater depth. I’m also essentially outlining how one might go about developing a more comprehensive study of twittering, because the brevity of the form and precise dating and linking would lend themselves to a detailed analysis of group interactions. I hesitate to spell it out like this here, because in part in choosing our followers allows us to enjoy the feeling of a protected space, but as we discussed from the outset, all of this is public and writing in public is an essential part of what this “many-to-many” is all about.

How You Might Evaluate Your Twitter Use

As we have discussed, evaluations can take many forms and suit different purposes. So far, we have distinguished between “summative” evaluations, such as grades after an exam or end of course which you have merely to accept, and “formative” evaluations, including comments and quizzes which you can talk about to help evaluate what you’ve done and to the end of improving teaching and learning. The analysis which follows is intended to be of the “formative” kind, offering you advice on how to learn what some have done and what you might do and understand this activity’s meaning and significance.

As we discussed in class last week, one way to understand what we are doing is to conduct a content analysis of your posts, whereby you print out all of your Twitter posts, “score” individual posts against meaningful categories, and then stand back and observe how these posts may have contributed to your work and how you have learned how to use them, which likely involves examining how the content of these posts has changed over time.

The content analysis proceeds by “scoring” each post against meaningful categories, high-level generalizations, which allow us to assign them meaning and then view them in patterns. We started with Manon’s recent posts, beginning with the following:

For this post, we noted that the “@sysyphos” tag means that she is responding to another user (and by putting it in this way, with the “@” sign, means he will see it as a “reply”), and we noted that it takes the form of asking a question, so we called it a “query”.

From there we discussed its qualities, or “attributes”, and noting the word “please” we scored it as “friendly”, or “a friendly query.”

We discussed as well how the subject of movie-going was different from the many posts relating to our academic work, so we added “free time”.

And we then had a lot of fun tagging the last sentence, “I would like to see it, too,” as we saw this “expressing a wish,” “asking for an invitation,” and our favorite, “hitting on Andreas”!

Having Our Fun and Eating It, Too

As often in this class, we did our best to do our work with great humor while keeping the academic dimensions in mind and considering how these posts contribute to our work. We discussed how such exchanges signaled the building of a relationship that we expected might eventually lead to academic discussions or arrangements to meet where academic discussion might go on: that as we are working together the “trivial” aspect was likely one step away from more serious things.   

We noted how this business of creating categories and tagging is not peculiar to the web, but is part of the much more general problem of finding or generating good keywords, titles, sub-titles, etc., and that this is part of the problem of developing generalizations, hierarchies, logic, transitions, understanding, etc. — that in such scoring we were practicing our English in a potentially sophisticated way: that for us, every exchange, including the presumably superficial, offered significant potential for practice.

Thus, we discussed, with much laughter, how the category of “hitting on Andreas” led us to consider the problems of irony, which we defined as suggesting something other than what you say, and we discussed the sending of mixed messages and problems of ambiguity.

Maybe Sharing, Insider Knowledge

This prepared us for the second entry, which we characterized as a “response”, but whose content was likely “insider knowledge.” We also discussed the problem of broadcasting “insider knowledge”, because as soon as we begin talking about things not everyone knows about — that we often send messages addressed and relevant to less than all of our “followers” — we are often dealing with problems of including and excluding others.

As we noted at another time, when a larger group is presented with seemingly obscure references, their response may well be: “what is this about?”, and as the group is open, others may see themselves as being invited to join in … just like life! We did not judge this as “good” or “bad”, but simply noted the action and implications and set this against posts that are easier for others in the group to understand and that may even invite others, including those not directly addressed, to respond. But not all posts call for responses.

Reflecting Mood, Proverbs, Uplift, and Negotiating Conflict

We assigned this post to the category of “Vincent-like-proverb“, because he was our resident expert in such things. It offers neither a query nor a response, but simply presentes itself as a “reflection” or “expression” of “thoughts” or “feelings”.

We discussed its opposite weeks before, when talking about how best to comment on each other’s works, and when some of us started off using “must” and “should”, as in, “you must do this …” and “you should do that …,” and so basically bossing each other around like we all had to suffer for decades as students in public school classrooms, where the teachers herded us all around like, well, children. We discussed the obvious: how our context is different and that as adults nobody HAS to do anything. And besides, we talked about how off-putting it is to be told what do do until we build trust, and even then, there are better ways of saying things, as we learned from our studies of “The Language of Meetings,” such as saying, “it might be helpful to consider.”

We discussed how this problem is especially acute online, when we are mostly at home working alone, having lost eye contact, the support of classroom courtesies, etc. There, the normal conflicts can easily get blown out of proportion, even subtle cues can assume much larger meanings than they deserve, and so there is a whole literature on “flaming“, mobbing, and the dysfunctional communications that management Prof. Bob Sutton at Stanford has written about in his excellent little book, “The No Asshole Rule.”

But here fortunately, we have admiration, support, optimism … almost all of our twitter posts have been especially supportive, constructive, and fun! And I think what Manon develops here is the “nice rule”, whereby I asked everyone to start off writing a number of very nice, supportive posts, even if they appeared altogether too nice, and to keep being extra nice for a few weeks and until we learned how to use this format. It is not that we wanted to dull our critical edge, but to reserve this space for networking, cooperation, etc, and so develop our criticial conversations, instead, in richer, more supportive contexts such as the classroom.

I think we found that while Twitter can help build trust and assist in the small things that add up, like making arrangements to meet, asking for and giving help locating resources, etc., it is much too lightweight to support more difficult conversations, and I think the way to see that is to examine the dynamics of Twitter conversations.

Reading Twitters in Patterns

After 30 minutes or so it appeared that everyone understood the general method and was ready to apply it, so I then asked everyone to work with a partner and analyze the samples of Twitter posts (all are viewable at OurTwitters) and to look for patterns.

For example, in the scan from one of our work sheets reproduced above (and which we read from the bottom to the top as it was published), the writer offers in turn a link and advice, then requests clarification, and then expresses feelings, which those keeping score noted might possibly include both hopelessness and respect for hard work. Before we give this pattern a name, let’s see it again in the lines that immediately preceded it.

Here, we first see “thanks” for a link or advice, then an expression or report on feelings, than a request for help and a supportive response. Those seeking rigorous logic in such microblogging as Twitter will likely be disappointed: Twitters appear to jump from one theme to another seemingly without logic.

The question here is about knowledge creation, and we know that this can take many forms, involves a number of steps, and so may be assisted in a number of ways. If you believe that brainstorming early on in the design process can yield tangible returns, as Kathy Sierra discusses and illustrates with the image above, then the apparently random conversations we find on Twitter, and often broken up with all manner of chatter, may also be viewed as an especially fertile ground.

To see this we might compare Twitter conversations to Sierra’s example, which she says is based on a highly-structured rapid prototyping activity derived from games developed by the thiagi consulting firm. Even a quick review of the many games you will find there and the advice on how to organize and evaluate them, suggests that Twitter may contribute to such important things as reducing fears of participation, offering experience in negotiating different points of view, offering opportunities to inquire of others as well as support them, never mind offering an audience for thoughts in general. Rather than logic, maybe the evaluative criteria for Twitter we should use would include things like creativity, conversation, and community.

Twitter for Life

Now I’ll write for the colleagues as I want to talk for a moment in more general terms and theoretical terms and speak of the implications for instructors interesting in working with Twitter.

Over the past semester, I have found that some of my otherwise hard-working students have less patience for the atmosphere of experiment and emphasis on “bildung” that many of us have long taken for granted and enjoyed in the universities and demand instead that our class be oriented to what they’ve come to expect from language classes, and in particular, structured language exercises. My concept was based on upper-division university writing courses with emphasis on the disciplines or professions, so I set them up to research the web for good writing in their target language, building their own blogs to report on what they found, and practice collaborative work by using Twitter. I found that most were unfamiliar with this otherwise standard university format, some were uncomfortable with the workshop format more generally, so we made a compromise whereby we spent one third of our class time in the traditional way, on the topic of the language of meetings using a textbook book of that title. Nonetheless, when it came to Twitter, discussion proved impossible until I implemented the scoring scheme outlined above and even then we remained within the puzzle-solving framework: open discussion on how were using the language and technology proved impossible.

This might well be due to the way I manage my classes, the way students view their education, or the way this institution is set up — I cannot say. But I can identify the limitations to my approach, pay tribute to the success of most of them, and on the same terms, offer a positive assessment of Twitter use.

I did not start with the empirical and evaluative frameworks we developed in our “scoring” exercise, because I had not found anyone having done anything like it nor thought of it; only after a month or so did I find the academicHacK article offering a list of possible classroom activities, and what that gave me a great boost, I did not find concrete advice on what I might do: we were having to make it up on our own. All I knew was that there was considerably research on the unique features of decentralized “many-to-many” conversations in the workplace, as illustrated above from an IBM study of groupware, and of course the work of John Seely Brown and others. While I cited that work I did not explain it in any detail. I offered only generally that Twitter’s “many-to-many” communications supporting small, spontaneous, and often changing working communications like the “activity-centered collaboration” modeled above.

The best I offered in any detail was an outline of how Twitter was being used in business as presented by Twitter maven Laura Filton, including reference to her Twitter for business links as well as her excellent Speaking and More section with videos of her lectures. While I felt I stood on solid ground by presenting Twitter as offering an opportunity for good language exercise, for improving group communications, and likely of relevance to communications in future workplaces, I could not offer anything like what the example of my students offers us now.

As I see it, the reason that the business examples are not immediately relevant is that business people are mostly concerned with developing effective corporate communications, public relations, and marketing, and the business Twitters I found are not especially interested, as we are, in learning. For many businesses, Twitter is cheap, fast, highly interactive, and for firms like Starbucks, whose success depends on constant re-invention, the feedback systems being built around Twitter are truly impressive. But our business model is different, and while I argued that Twitter-like communications was likely in my students future, I simply could not expect them to extract larger principles and apply them. Thus, their achievement here really is to their credit!

The Technologists Were Not Helping Us Much Either

We were also not being helped by the dominant technologist discourse, or talk, which to considerable extent follows Clive Thompson’s famous his WIRED magazine article from June 2007, where he invites us to see “Twitter as 6th sense” and in basically literary and futuristic terms. For example, he writes that while individually the posts seem so “stupifyingly trivial,” over time one develops “an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me…”

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

The thing is, while I think he’s got this right, such formulations really didn’t help me manage my class, nor can I see how they could really have helped my students. To be sure, I love this way of understanding of how we follow each other’s Twitter’s all day, what the author calls “proprioception,” and what I might prefer to call “being aware of others in my periphery,” because I think about this and like this all the time. One of the things I love to do when photographing is try to see all of the elements in a picture in some ideal or interesting proportion, and I make a game of it, walking through the city seeing how well it might be done, and sometimes my eye suddenly sees things all fitting together, as here.

This is to exercise an aesthetic sensibility, entertaining visual form with en eye, so to speak, to things like order, balance, harmony, symmetry, etc. — something written about very nicely these days by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. But when I am photographing my subjects are mute, so while the image gives you an idea of it, the better example is from dancing, because when I am dancing (something I do a lot of and write about here), not only have I to keep track of dozens of other dancers spinning around each other, navigating my partner and myself to stay free of high-heeled shoes spinning waist-high, but we dancers are constantly responding, imitating, and learning from each other — feeding off of the collective fire as we would add our own little bit of energy and form to it.

The dancers and soccer players in the class seem to understand this, they often look at me knowingly and as if grateful that someone discussed in public their secret lives, but such ways of explaining things are surely limited in classrooms of cultural and intellectual and motivational diversity. For example, I greatly admire the writing of my students in the field of logistics, but I have no mind for it, nor for mathematics and many of the other cognitive styles, as the cognitive psychologists would put it, so while colorful and fun, my analogies are limited in scope and appeal: I need better examples and better ways of illuminating the principles, too.

Better Examples: Small Group Support (thank God for the librarians!)

Maybe my students don’t need more than what I’ve given them, because they did just fine, but I think we need to find better examples. Let me introduce you to Molly Grubb, whose insightful Twitter? At work? Yes please. Microblogging’s possibilities for internal communication offers three distinct ways of talking about this technology and does so in a way that, with each step, we might see coming closer to our own.

First, starts off as if the problem were best understood as one of interface design and functionality:

• updates are short so easy to scan
• collective knowledge creation
• establishing weak ties conducive to building social capital
• short constant news stream keeps people up to date
• and so on…

It sounds like she is marketing a product to sell, doesn’t it? I think I know what she is talking about, for I sometimes talk like that myself, but as I evaluate different ways of talking about Twitter I now see it is terribly abstract. I know what she means about “building social capital”, but this is probably because I live with a social scientist. If we were working for a governmental or non-governmental organization and in the business of organizing people, I suspect we’d soon all be talking like that.

But our interest is not really the technology, but gaining practice with our English in conversation, online, and using English to present ourselves, research on the web, etc., and such specificity is essential for any instructor considering the use of Twitter in the classroom. We need something closer to what we did with it, such as, “share links, organize our studies and working groups, help each other …”

Molly Grubb’s second way of talking about Twitter might be closer to this, as she describes Twitter as a kind of tool for good social ends:

• allows for email congestion to be reduced (yay! )
• provides a tool for cross functional communication (isn’t it great when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing?)
• builds tacit organisational knowledge (you get to know each other, and the way others think)
• employee participation (paying attention to and recognizing people makes them more productive)

And I think therein lies the trick: note how the first half of each point sounds like a tool, but the second half, in parenthesis, sounds like people talking to people in the language they use over the kitchen table.

And it is with this second that Molly Grubb concludes: when she steps completely out her geeky shoes and starts talking about user and business and person needs and demands that we think about why communications are important to us. This engaging rhetoric suggests someone grabbing your collar by the office water cooler and demanding that you talk in everyday terms about everyday needs:

Isn’t it a good thing to allow employees insight into each other’s jobs? To develop internal networks across geographical boundaries? To engage in conversation with each other? To break artificially created silos? To engage? Microblogging is just another method amongst a myriad of possibilities to allow these things to happen. Some organisations are now recognising that employees use social networks as quasi equivalents of talking at the water cooler or wandering around to someone’s desk for a chat – and that social networks aren’t all playful banter and can facilitate meaningful conversation and knowledge creation.

It seems to me that, when it comes to connecting with people outside of our own professional or friendship circles, the most accessible and convincing voices are those that are practical, conversational, engaging, and by their examples carry the “ring of truth”.

I think this is especially true when it comes to learning new technologies, because at least then we don’t have to suffer the voices of brilliant designers and their marketing buddies trying to dazzle us with bells and whistles or the sometimes abstract and possibly self-interested agendas of the instructor!

Best, I think, is when my partner or office mate or someone else nearby who has figured out how to make this peculiar thing work takes the time to show me how to use it effectively to solve problems we have in common, talks to me in my own language, and is available for questions when I need him or her — because that’s what I think my students achieved here: the “early adopters” among them figured out how to use the technology and showed the others the way.

This brings me to my favorite example of the bunch I eventually found on the web, Mick Jacobsen’s post to his fellow librarians.

At the Skokie Public Library Twitter has become a nimble, extremely quick, and easy to use internal communication device. A small group of Skokie employees use Twitter to bounce ideas off one another, solve simple issues such as “how do I check something out to missing,” and even answer reference questions.

What makes me excited about this use of Twitter? First it came about totally on its own, nobody planned to use Twitter as a means of communicating. Second is the mass effect of Twitter. I can send a question to many and not have to worry about one particular person being away from their phone/email. The third is the chance of transparency (this is Tame the Web after all). Anybody who wishes can follow and contribute (like you if you want, and why wouldn’t you, lots of cool ideas are being discussed) to what is going on at the SPL.

I love how he knows who he is talking to, his colleagues, who we can assume have lots of experience learning and using complicated card catalogs and databases and accounting systems that somebody else figured out and made them use, and who presents as a wonderful thing a technology that helps them do what they, as public librarians really like to do — which is to be part of an open, dynamic, public service. What the librarians so happily describe is a technology that suits their purposes, including, sharing their work and feelings about their work with each other. Plus, it sounds to me like they like the fact that nobody dumped it on them and that they can “own” it.

Now that we are at this level of experienced users we can begin to model how it is that only half of our class got deep into Twitter, and to do that we can refer to a standard model of technology adoption, illustrated above, and put it as a research question, particularly as I want to ask it of my students in the coming weeks.

So now I return to addressing my students.

Were you among the “early adopters” who began Twittering right away, experimented with different kinds of questions and comments, and whose Twitter posts changed significantly — as we discussed in class last week — over time? Or are you among the “early majority” who waited until others showed the way and then followed them? Or are you among the “late majority” who waited until Twitter use became so widespread that the way to do so was long established, and/or until you felt you had no choice, offered minimum posts, did not really “follow” the others, and did not experiment much beyond answering the simple question “what are you doing”

I’m pretty sure that with the exception of just one person, at least in theory, every single one of you played the role of an “early adopter” and showed someone else the way: say a few words on how you did so. And I’m pretty sure that, possibly with the exception of just one person, at least in theory, someone else helped you find your way: say a few words about that. If you can answer both questions, well, I think that your answer should explain to you the beauty of this application and how you set up the supportive framework that led to this experiment’s success.

The Beauty of Being a Follower

Whether we are learning languages, technology, or whatever, often the most interesting of all students are not the leading edge “innovators” and “early adopters”, because by definition they pick up and run with new things on their own; for them, learning seems to come naturally, teaching them is hardly work at all, and so their success, while exemplary in respect to outcome, might actually be of little credit to the instructor or the course lucky enough to have them.

What made our use of Twitter interesting and a success, I believe, was both the intense sociability associated with it and the fact that for most it did not come easily and so had to be shown by example and use governed by intelligibility and acceptance among peers. It was almost a parallel universe, because we certainly could not talk about it in class, but by the end of the term the answer to the question of “what are you doing” was answered in your terms: you were answering and asking questions, offering and responding to expressions of mood or feeling, and offering and thanking for links and other resources: you “owned” your Twitter, as we say.

Individually, as in the tango, the beauty of the “followers” is the true test of leaders: the whole business works when your partner looks good. At the same time, “following” is every bit as vital, creative, and essential to the business as leading, and the leaders are completely dependent on the followers. Socially, “following” provides constant opportunities for everyone to help everyone else, and that means, when confronted with new conditions, opportunities to learn.

And as it happens, Twitter puts “followers” at the center of its application design: you build your website not simply by 140 character posts: you build it by clicking the links that feed the comments of others onto the very same stack of blog posts as your own: “authorship” is here, constructed literally, as a collective enterprise: Whatever you say is immediately put into a context of others.

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