08/20/12

Random list of links from #moocmooc tagged tweets sent during Mooc Mooc

The following is a list of five links selected randomly from all links shared via twitter using the #moocmooc hashtag during the 7 day MOOC about MOOC‘s held in August 2012.


Five random links from #moocmooc:

Refresh your browser to renew the list


Some notes on the data:

  • The links are selected from 1009 links pulled from tweets tagged with #moocmooc.
  • They are all shortened url’s. Each url appears only once, but the use of different url shortening services by different users means that some of the url’s may redirect to the same content.
  • The links were pulled from tweets sent between midday Sunday August 12th through early morning Monday August 20th.
  • I have not made any effort to check for spam. However, Twitter was actively removing tweets all week and I have not found any spam links.
  • If you find any spam, please leave a comment to that effect and I will remove the link.
  • This is not a dynamic search, no new tweets are being added.
  • Be sure to bookmark any content you want to get back to. The next time you visit this page, you will be presented with a different list of links.
  • These links direct to blog posts, articles of interest, videos and pictures. Everything #moocmooc participants shared during the week.
08/18/12

#moocmooc tagged twitter posts for first six days of MOOC MOOC

** Update Data now complete through midnight Saturday. Tweet count for the final day was 264.

I have been watching the twitter traffic #moocmooc all week. Here is an interactive graph showing daily tweets by time over the six plus days since the MOOC MOOC started. The data is current through ~9:45 am EST on Saturday the 18th.
Continue reading

08/16/12

My #moocmooc twitter saga

I have been trying to participate in the MOOC MOOC on and off all week.  They are relying heavily on twitter as a mechanism to stimulate group interaction and to aggregate information.  This is common practice and is done by including a hashtag such as #moocmooc in all of the tweets you want seen by the group.

I noticed early in the week that some of the tweets I tagged with #moocmooc were not showing up in the stream. As the week progressed, more and more of my tweets failed to show up.  In order to find out why, I submitted the following support ticket:

Regarding: Search and trends
Subject: Tweets on home page but missing in search
Description of problem: My tweets are being posted and are visible on my home page but are not showing up when I search by hashtag or use “from:andrewstaroscik”

This makes it very difficult to participate in group interactions that are dependent on aggregation by hashtag
Full name: Andrew Staroscik
Twitter username: @andrewstaroscik

Notice, it is not just #moocmooc, my tweets don’t even show up in a search of tweets based on my own username.

After a few less than helpful email exchanges, I received this rather dismissive message earlier today:

a_nace, Aug 16 10:16 am (PDT):
Hi andrewstaroscik,

Thanks so much for your email. This article covers common reasons why some Tweets might not be found in search: http://support.twitter.com/articles/66018-i-m-missing-from-search

Please note that to provide the best possible search experience for all users, as well as due to resource constraints, not every Tweet will display in search results. We’re striving to include as many Tweets as possible while keeping search quality high.

Rest assured that your followers will still see all your Tweets and @mentions. The best course of action is to continue tweeting, retweeting and mentioning others to gain resonance amongst your followers so that search results are up to date for your account.

We really appreciate your feedback and I’ve reported it to our team for review.

Best,

a_nace

Twitter Support
support.twitter.com
@support

I am sharing this partly out of frustration and partly as a cautionary tale to educators enamored with the potential of twitter to promote connectivity. Twitter has great promise, but it is not perfect.  When I figured out that my tweets were not going to show up in the #moocmooc stream, I felt less connected to the community and stopped following the thread.  Not a big deal for me, but it is something educators might what to keep in mind if they are going to rely on hashtags in distance learning. Novice twitterers may be especially vulnerable to exclusion.

For some reason, the twitter filter algorithm has deemed my use of the #moocmooc hashtag as inappropriate.

Funny that the spammers are not having any trouble getting through.

And… none of this explains why “from:andrewstaroscik” gives flawed results.

 

 

 

 

08/15/12

#moocmooc first three days of activity based on tweet abundance

Here is an update of yesterday’s graph containing the first three days of activity binned in 15 minute intervals.

Spam started appearing in the thread midday yesterday and accounts for some of the increased traffic in day’s 2 and 3, but I have not tried to figure out how much.

Interesting that the 10 pm (est) video discussion replaced the the 6 pm social hour on day three.

click image to enlarge

Stats for the first three days:

  • 865 tweets on day one (Sunday)
  • 1100 tweets on day two (Monday)
  • 1084 tweets on day three (tuesday)
  • As of 4 pm EST on day four there were over 100 more tweets than there were at the same time on either of the previous two days.

Things to keep in mind:

  • Spamming is increasing traffic
  • There is an bug in the twitter search system that is preventing some tweets (including most of mine) from showing up in the #moocmooc data.
08/15/12

#moocmooc wordle Aug 8 – Aug 14 2012

Three more wordle using all the tweet data tagged with #moocmooc since August 8th through about 9 am this morning.

The first was generated using the same criteria as the one generated yesterday. The data for this was pulled at around noon EST on Wednesday:


click image to enlarge

follow this link view on the wordle site

The second one is based on the same set of tweets but all of the @usernames were removed to reveal the most common words:


click image to enlarge

follow this link view on the wordle site

Finally this one shows the most active tweeters. This is drawn from the same 3478 tweets using only the user names of each tweet. The largest names generated the most tweets. Wordle splits words at underscores, so I had to remove all underscores. This means names such as chris_friend show up as chrisfriend.


click image to enlarge

follow this link view on the wordle site

About the data:

  • Based on 3478 tweets with the hashtag #moocmooc
  • mooc, #moocmooc, @moocmooc, RT and variations were removed
  • About 900 of the tweets were retweets
08/14/12

snapshot of activity at #moocmooc using tweet abundance

I am intrigued by the potential for twitter activity to indicate engagement and participation in a cMOOC. It is too soon to tell, but if twitter is a good indicator of participation, what will happen to tweet abundance and average tweet per person over the course of the short week long moocmooc course?

It is too soon to tell, but here is a first snapshot of twitter activity binned in 15 minute intervals by day from August 8th through 1:30 pm EST today, August 14th. The course officially started on August 12th.

click image to enlarge

So far tweet activity is increasing day over day.

There were 869 tweets on day one and 1108 tweets on day two. Day three is not over yet, but tweet’s are up by about 10% over the same time yesterday.

The daily twitter socials are quite apparent in the data. There were 504 tweets between 5:30 and 6:30 on Sunday and 554 tweets over the same two hour interval on Monday.

08/14/12

#moocmooc wordle Aug 8 – Aug 13 2012

Wordle: #moocmooc Aug 8 - 13 2012I am intrigued by the potential to pull information about the current moocmooc by mining twitter data. Instead of contributing to the collaborative google documents yesterday, I worked to wrap my brain around the data api’s offered by Twitter. Here is my first pass at playing with the data:

A wordle from all tweets tagged with #moocmooc between Aug 8th and earlier this morning ( ~8 am Aug 14th EST).

it contains2108 tweets. I removed over 5000 mentions of “mooc” and “moocmooc” and 1029 incidences of the term “RT” because these terms dominated the visualization.

A set of @’s dominate the image. One interpretation is that we are using a diverse vocabulary targeted at a small number of participants.

Click on the centered image to see a larger, more crisp version of the image.
Click on the thumbnail at the top left to see the java version at the wordle site
Click here to see the raw text I used to create the image.