The document summarizes a case study of using event-based social media to build personal learning networks at a conference. Key findings include: - Social media allowed people to meet and connect with others they would not have had time for otherwise. - It provided a platform to ask questions and gain knowledge on the subject matter. - There were challenges around following all the activity and ensuring engagement with live presentations. - Ethical issues around permissions, archiving data, and expressing context require further exploration. - Next steps involve investigating archiving procedures and visualizations to represent networking and context.

1. Building personal learning networks
through event-based social media: a
case study of the SMiLE project
PLE Conference, July 2012
Nicole Beale, Lisa Harris, Graeme Earl
@nicoleebeale @lisaharris
@graemeearl

3. Presentation plan
• How we collected the data
• Early findings
– Implications for the development of learning
communities
• Networking and building ties
• Subject knowledge
– Ethical issues
– Next steps

4. The Team

5. #caasoton
• Project details are available from the Digital Economy USRG
website
• 13,000 tweets using the #caasoton hashtag
• 430 photos on Flickr
• Our Vimeo videos have been viewed over 2,100 times, with
viewers from 47 countries.
• Nearly half of the 450 conference delegates used #caasoton
on Twitter before, during, or after the event
• 70 people registered as ‘virtual attendees’ with some 20
additional twitter users joining in the conversations at random
• The CAA Conference website has a round up of social media
activity

6. Defining ‘Content’

8. Understanding the data

9. Implications for the PLE: networking
and building ties
• social media allowed people to ‘meet’ others that they would not
have had time to meet if those tools were not being so extensively
supported
• circles of contacts were strengthened and extended through
conversations occurring on Twitter around a common topic
• they had identified new contacts with whom a connection was not
apparent before engaging with their social media user profiles
• it provided a way to find out more about delegates who were at the
conference, in order for new possibilities for connections to be
explored
• increased interest in sessions being run at the conference therefore
broadening the group of participants,

10. Implications for the PLE: subject
knowledge
• Twitter provided a safe environment to ask ‘silly’ questions
that delegates would not be comfortable asking F2F
• A platform for conversations between individuals who were
not together physically (because of differing interests)
• Online interactions made the subject matter more accessible
for newcomers to archaeological computing
• Gaining ideas of topics that others found interesting
• Additional tools and resources were referred to and linked to
• Social media provided opportunities to follow up things that
were happening at the event and therefore lead to the
discovery of further information, more quickly
• Individuals could identify relevant sessions and attend the
most useful parts of the conference

11. Challenges
• “If you have no social media account you are no
one...”
• “I think just looking at the twitter stream gives a
skewed idea of what people really think is
interesting or noteworthy.”
• “It was hard to follow since so much posting was
going on. I also felt like some folks were tweeting
at the expense of hearing the presentations or
discussion effectively.”
• “…. I just think people aren't good at multi-
tasking even though they think they are.”

12. Ethical issues
• Securing permissions - where are the
public/private boundaries?
• relationship between making thoughts public (i.e.
tweeting) and making broader interconnected
narratives and opinions public (i.e. via data
mining of tweets)
• Should social media data be archived, and how?

13. Next steps
• we are exploring possibilities for a University-
wide system or procedure for archiving tweets.
• investigating new ways of expressing context
through mechanisms such as timelines and
network visualisations
• Code of conduct for ethical storage and curation
of social media (with Oxford E-research Centre)
• Case study for JISC Datapool project

14. Questions for you 
• One of our delegates said: “At least before
twitter I could dwell in blissful ignorance of all
the cool pertinent stuff I was missing”
Any comments on this?