Running this course this afternoon:

Checking out a story in i this evening, which reckons that Darwin (and other?) theories wouldn’t have happened in the modern day:

Our world is a frantic, intellectually combustible place. Opinions are 10 a penny in the age of Twitter. Mature reflection does not play a major part in public discourse. Knee-jerk reaction?

That’ll do. Of course, we have great thinkers today, but they are often drowned out by the general cacophony of soundbites and tweets in a world where we value pithiness over argument, where the ability to be smart, or funny, or controversial in a sentence is prized and envied. It does make you wonder what sort of intellectual legacy this generation will leave.

A new term has become popular – chatterboxing, meaning watching a TV programme while talking to others about it online.  A lot of people are doing it, mostly via Twitter

A lot of TV programmes now display their hashtag when they start as an invitation to tweet during the programme – and a lot of people do. It’s reported that some popular programmes have attracted 100s of thousands of tweets. We wanted to get a bit more insight into this phenomenon so we tracked the tweets of viewers watching one recent sporting event on a UK channel over 4 days.  We collected all the tweets and then analysed them on a daily and hourly basis.

Our findings show that although the number of tweets, compared to the size of the audience, is not large they can have a significant impact.  The numbers give an indication of the response of the audience to programme scheduling decisions and also point to how more effective use might be made of promoting the use of hashtags.

The report on the results so far is at davidr-blog.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/386657

Universities are encouraged to learn from Supermarket consumer-led strategies:

He recommended that institutions should embrace social media as a feedback tool and to enable “two-way communication” with students because traditional methods of complaining were out of date.

“If I am unhappy about something, I don’t write a nice letter and wait for a reply. I start broadcasting to my 8,500 followers. Everyone is their own broadcaster, with their own listeners,” he said.

Meanwhile, Peter Slee, deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, told the conference in London that joining a gym was a good analogy when discussing student-institution relations.

Although gyms – and universities – could provide classes, facilities, staff and guidance at a certain cost, success and happiness with the price paid were ultimately down to the commitment of an individual, Professor Slee said.

“You get out of a service what you put into it. Motivation and commitment to study is the biggest factor in whether students are happy.”

Read full story. I’m wary about the idea of universities being ‘consumerised’, but I definitely think we should be listening to the students, and helping the students understand that they have a responsibility to put the effort in.

This afternoon’s workshop in Leicester:

An interesting ‘blend’ of digital and paper, using Twitter to encourage support for the football team:

Workshop being run at The University of Winchester today:

Setting Up a Twitter Account Feb 2012

Workshop that I’m running this afternoon:

This afternoon I’m teaching my Twitter course, and this morning Twitter adds a couple of new features… so let’s highlight them here. The section ‘Mentions’ has been replaced with your user name (probably more intuitive anyway), but also highlights some other new activities, of which I can see at present who has recently followed me (which gives me the opportunity to go back in and see if I want to follow them back):

The second change is the addition of a new ‘activity’ strand, which seems to overlap somewhat with above, but with far more activity. Of particular interest is that it shows who the people you’ve followed have followed (so if you’re in the same interest group, you may well find them interesting also), and also what they have favourited:

I wonder how long before the third party apps (e.g. Hootsuite) incorporate them, as I often don’t go via the web interface at all.