Infoskills 2.012 – Practical Exercises in Social Media Network Analysis #change11

As ever, it seems the longer I have to prepare something, the less likely I am to do it. I was supposed to be running a #change11 MOOC session this week – Infoskills 2.012 How to do a lot with a little – but having had it in the diary for a 6 months or so, I have, of course, done nothing to prepare for it… (I didn’t come up with the 2.012 – not sure who did?)

Anyway….over the weekend, I gave a presentation (Social Media Visualisation Hacks) that, typically, bewildered the audience with a blizzard of things that are possible when it comes to looking at social networks but that are still alien to most:

As ever, the presentation is not complete (i.e. the slides really need to be complemented by a commentary), but that’s something I hope to start working on improving – maybe starting this week…

The deck is a review – of sorts – of some of the various ways we can look at social networks and the activity that takes place within them. The slides are prompts, keys, search phrase suggestions that provide a starting point for finding out more. Many of the slides contain screenshots – and if you peer closely enough, you can often see the URL. For posts on my blog, searching with the word ouseful followed by key terms from the post title will often turn up the result on major search engines. Many of the slides identify a “hack” that is described in pseudo-tutorial form on the this blog, or on Martin Hawksey’s MASHe blog.

I put together a delicious stack of links relating to the presentation here: #drg12 – Visualising Social Networks (Tutorial Posts)

For a tutorial stack that focusses more on Yahoo Pipes (though who knows how long that is still for this world given the perilous nature of Yahoo at the moment), see: Twitter Pipes

My #change11 week was supposed to be about new info skills, with a practical emphasis. A couple of other presentations relating to how we might appropriate (a-pro-pre-eight) tools and applications can be found here: Appropriate IT – My ILI2011 Presentation and Just Do IT Yourself… MY UKSG Presentation.

If all you do in Google is 2.3 keyword searches, this deck – Making the Most of Google – (though possibly a little dated by now), may give you some new ideas.

For a more formal take on infoskills for the new age, (though I need to write a critique of this from my own left-field position), see the Cambridge University Library/Arcadia Project “New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL)” project via the Arcadia project.

If you want to do some formal reading in the visualisation space, check out 7 Classic Foundational Vis Papers You Might not Want to Publicly Confess you Don’t Know.

Via @cogdog/Alan Levine, I am reminded of Jon Udell’s Seven ways to think like the web. You do think like that, right?!;-)

Mulling over @downes’ half hour post on Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and what we can do to make it better, I see the MOOC framework as providing an element of co-ordination, pacing and a legacy resource package. For my week, I was expected(?!) to put together some readings and exercises and maybe a webinar. But I haven’t prepared anything (I tried giving a talk at Dev8D earlier this year completely unprepared (though I did have an old presentation I could have used) and it felt to me like a car crash/a disaster, so I know I do need to prep things (even though it may not seem like it if you’ve heard me speak before!;-))

But maybe that’s okay, for one week of this MOOC? The OUSeful.info blog, where you’re maybe reading this, is an ongoing presentation, with a post typically every day or so. WHen I learn something related to the general themes of this blog, I post it here, often as a partial tutorial (partial in the sense that you often have to work through the tutorial for the words to make sense – they complement the things you should be seeing on screen – if you look – as you work through the tutorial; in a sense, the tutorial posts are often second screen complements to and drivers of an activity on another screen).

I’ve personally tried registering with MOOCs a couple of times, but never completed any of the activities. Some of the MOOC related readings or activities pass my way through blogs I follow, or tweeted links that pique my interest, and sometimes I try them out. I guess I’m creating my own unstructured uncourse* daily anyway… (*uncourses complement MOOCs, sort of… They’re courses created live in partial response to feedback, but also reflecting the “teacher”‘s learning journey through a topic. Here’s an example that led to a formal OU course: Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment. The philosophy is based on the “teacher” modelling – and documenting – a learning journey. Uncourses fully expect the “teacher” not being totally knowledgeable about the subject area, but being happy to demonstrate how they go about making sense of a topic that may well be new to them).

So… this is my #change11 offering. It’s not part of the “formal” course, (how weird does that sound?!) unless it is… As the MOOC is now in week 29, if its principles have been taken on-board, you should be starting to figure out your own distributed co-ordination mechanisms by now. Because what else will you do when the course is over? Or will it be a course that never ends, yet ceases to have a central co-ordination point?

PS if you want to chat, this blog is open to comments; you can also find me on Twitter as @psychemedia

PPS seems like I’ve had at least one critical response (via trackbacks) towards my lacksadaisical “contribution” towards my “teaching” week on the #Change11 MOOC. True. Sorry. But not. I should have kept it simple, posted my motto – identify a problem, then hack a solution to it, every day – and left it at that… It’s how I learn about this stuff… (and any teaching I receive tends to be indirect – by virtue stuff other folk have published that I’ve discovered through web search, (aka search queries – questins – that I’ve had to formulate to help me answer the problem I have identified/created…).