Twitter Credibility Part 2: making a research plan

Credibility: qualities that someone has that make people believe or trust them
definition from http://www.macmillandictionary.com/

A week or so ago I proposed repeating a recent American research experiment looking at perceived credibility based on twitter streams. I had a lot of encouragement - including 8 twitter contacts who kindly volunteered to let me use their twitter streams as part of my experiment.

Having allowed enough time to pass that these 8 have probably forgotten they offered, and hence have no mention of the project in their stream I have taken snapshots and begun to think about the next stages, and would welcome any feedback on how I take things from here.

In the original American research, participants were asked 3 questions about the (fictitious professors) twitter streams they were asked to view.

The questions were:
This professor seems caring [strongly disagree - 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 - strongly agree]
This professor seems competent [strongly disagree - 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 - strongly agree]
This professor seems trustworthy [strongly disagree - 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 - strongly agree]

My first research question is purely to test if I can replicate the same results - namely, that when asking the 'caring' question about tweets of a personal nature, there will be a significantly higher response that viewing tweets of a more academic nature.

The tweet streams I want to use are genuine users, but anonymised, as although I suspect discerning twitter users make assumptions based on avatars, account names, number of followers etc, that is not part of the first question. Real streams contain replies and retweets which is such a fundamental part of twitter I don't think faking it is easily achievable. Here are a five of my anonymised streams:

 

So having a quick look through those 5, how would you respond for each to the questions: "this person seems caring?" "this person seems competent?" "this person seems trustworthy?"

I think all five display some degree of personal and professional tweets with numbers 1 and 4 primarily social, 2 and 5 primarily professional and 3 a mix. That's getting subjective, so do you think I really ought to edit the streams more tightly to make sure I can compare personal with professional on a less murky basis? Or more interestingly; What is it about the tweets above that lead you to make judgements about the person who posted them?

[etiquette note: please be kind, these are real people who volunteered, I'm interested in the process of making judgements not in judging these individuals!]

Weekends, Holidays and Google Analytics

I installed Google Analytics tracking code on our staff and student intranets (home/login pages) late last year, so here is an overview on the data I am now gathering.

studentcentral (Blackboard - our student intranet)

staffcentral (web pages plus CMS - our staff intranet and default staff homepage)

My observations:

1. I'm interested in the weekends, although on studentcentral there is a clear weekend dip it's primarily Saturday that dips, Sunday stats are considerably higher. On staffcentral, both weekend days have very low rates. Who would have guessed the ideal downtime was Saturday not Sunday?

2. The Easter holidays, which we're now a week and a bit into for the students is very clear - their graph loses all normal shape, however for staff it seems to be pretty much business as usual.

3. And look at the typical shape of a week - students peak on Monday, tire on Tuesday and Wednesday, and reinvigorated on Thursdays and then tail off on Fridays. Staff on the other hand peak on Monday and then tend to go downhill all week...

50 reasons why you need an iPad (supporting your teaching and research with a tablet)

I've offered a conference session with the above title later in the year, so am gathering resources and ideas here to get some feedback before I present a more coherent version! I intentionally put iPad in the title, as that is the tablet I have most personal experience with, and the current market leader.

I know that it's impractical for all the students in a class to have a tablet with them, but that doesn't negate the value of the teacher having one - whether in class or for preparation/research outside the classroom. Here are my initial 5 categories of table computing use, and I welcome your thoughts and extra resources to help complete these!

1. Using an iPad in the classroom

47 Interesting Ways to use an iPad in the Classroom

From the excellent 'interesting ways' series from Tom Barrett.

iPad for eLearning from the eFront Learning Blog.
Comments that the iPad supports synchronous (e.g. Facetime) and asynchronous (e.g. presentation of non-flash eLearning materials) learning and provides a list of relevant links.

2. Supporting your Research

I've also got the notes from a recent similar presentation ("iPad Apps for Education") by a Portsmouth colleague, Timothy Collinson. Timothy talks about a range of uses of the iPad in HE, and his app recommendations in this category include:

• GoodReader (Timothy says "best 59p ever spent!"). This also gets a top recommendation from joeyanne on twitter who says: "GoodReader - great for storing and reading documents, annotating PDFs, and syncing Dropbox"
• iBooks for um, eBooks...
• Blackboard Mobile (if you have it at your Institution)
• Safari, for easy web browsing/searching
• Referencing with Mendeley

Personally, I love reading using iBooks on my iPad, annotating, searching, highlighting, dictionary - it makes you a much more effective reader.

3. Productivity


An excellent marking example from Becka Colley: iAnnotate PDF, which Becka suggests "to show how they can mark student work with verbatim comments"

A few more ideas from Timothy's presentation:

• Dragon Dictate - impressive speech to text conversion
• Flipboard - a customisable news/social media feed app
• and a myriad of dictionaries, thesauruses and atlases.

And of course there is always email - so much easier than typing on your phone but still mobile enough to churn through your inbox during a quiet spell on the train or in a meeting.

4. Supporting your own learning

Timothy suggests a Flashcard app for creating your own language learning sets.

"Thousands of Apps. Endless Potential" says the Apple in Education. Here is their top pics for Maths and Science apps:

5. A little Rest & Relaxation

The iPad is excellent for social networking and news. Keeping in touch has never been easier.

And never forget the iPad is perfect for a little casual gaming if you like that sort of thing, and I guarantee there's a game out there for everyone. Here's what I was doing immediately prior (and probably post) writing this:

(Bejeweled Blitz if you don't recognise it)

Right, let's see if I'm still top of the leaderboard...

Social use of Social Networks - does it really change your credibility?

There’s been a lot of buzz this week about some recent American research into improved lecturer credibility by using social media for personal as well as academic use:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a935339874~db=all

In the research, students were asked to rate the credibility of three imaginary lecturers based on their twitter posts - one posting entirely social tweets, one entirely academic and one a mixture. The results found that the purely social lecturer was perceived to have a higher credibility that the purely academic by the student sample. And there is already research showing that improved lecturer credibility leads to increased learning outcomes.

My colleague Peps considers this on his blog expanding the question to researcher credibility and thinking about issues of transparency as a lecturer. I have also seen an article today extending the ideas to business and corporate tweeting.

So I am interesting in validating some of these ideas and seeing if they hold true within a UK Higher Education environment. If we broaden the student/lecturer relationship to an audience/candidate one, then the sorts of questions I want to know the answers to are:

1. Does the perceived credibility depend on how familiar the audience are with the social platform?

2. If the audience and candidate are acquainted in real life does the social presence have less of an effect?

3. If the audience and candidate are acquainted, does the length of their relationship change the credibility?

4. If the candidate gets too social can we go past the peak of credibility?

5. Does the platform matter? Do Facebook audiences measure credibility in the same ways as Twitter audiences?

6. Is the lecturer/student relationship special in any way, or do employee/boss or colleague/colleague relationships follow the same model?

7. Does a company or institution tweeting in a social way increase their credibility or does the 'facelessness' get in the way?

8. Is having a lot of tweets/followers/following an influencing credibility factor?

etc.

What do you think? Is this worth researching? I would like to run a trial (using twitter as the platform) and see if initial data looks like this might be something worth pursuing - and this is where you (dear blog reader) come in.

I would like to construct a series of candidates with twitter streams for a questionnaire, and ask respondents to rate their perceptions of the candidates on a variety of criteria. The pic of my stream in this example is what I have in mind. Rather than doing this in a fake way, I was hoping some of you would volunteer to let me use you in my questionnaire as examples. I won't hide your identity (after all, your twitter streams are public) but I won't publicly publish results about you specifically (although you can have your own results). Is anyone happy for me to try?