Social networking in scientific conferences –

Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific

community

Martin Ebner1 and Wolfgang Reinhardt2

1 Graz University of Technology, Faculty of Computer Science, Inffeldgasse 16b,8010 Graz, Austria martin.ebner@tugraz.at

2 University of Paderborn, Institute of Computer Science, Fuerstenallee 11,33102 Paderborn Germany wolle@upb.de

Abstract. Twitter is the fastest growing member community of thelast year. With a rate of 1382% it grows 6 times faster than for examplethe world biggest social networking application Facebook. In this paperwe ask how Twitter can serve as resource at scientific conferences andsupport the scientific community. Furthermore we ask if Twitter ads anyscientific value to conferences. We chose this year ED-MEDIA conferenceas example for the use of Twitter at a scientific conference and showhow the micro-blogging tool got seamlessly integrated in the well-knowncommunication infrastructure of conferences.

Key words: scientific communities, twitter, dynamics of communities,visualization, science 2.0

1 Introduction

Since Tim O’Reilly [14] announced for the very first time the term Web 2.0 anddescribed a new way to dealing with the WorldWideWeb, a dramatically changehappened. Users working nowadays completely different, instead of mainly con-suming information from static webpages, they play an active role, they con-tribute, discuss and share information around the globe. Since then Social Net-works and Social Communities are growing rapidly and aim to connect peoplewith same interests to enhance their daily life as well as working processes.Stephen Downes [5] also mentioned that “Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technol-

ogy - This means there is no technological revolution, it is a social revolution”and pointed out the importance for learning and teaching, named e-Learning 2.0.Especially in Technology Enhanced Learning lot of research has been carried outto foster the use of Weblogs, Wikis, Podcasts and further popular applications [4,3, 20, 7] and to improve students’ learning behaviors. However, if we take a lookto all this great research results it can be stated that there is a great potentialby introducing Web 2.0 applications to the classroom. Furthermore emerging re-search on the use of Mash-Ups [12], Personal Learning Environments [18], OpenEducational Resources and the use of mobile technologies for learning purposes

2 Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt

give a promising future forecast. Without any doubt it does not matter if itis called e-learning, m-Learning or even u-Learning (ubiquitous learning) [22]the influence of technology will increase. On the one hand it can be concludedthat researchers did a lot of work to improve the daily education, but on theother hand there are nearly no work about how such technologies can help theresearchers themselves. As Erik Duval announced on the workshop homepagethe main question we have to deal with “How could we make use of science2.0

opportunities for Technology Enhanced Learning researchers?” [6]. In this pub-lication the authors will concentrate about how the micro-blogging tool Twittercan be used on scientific conferences for e-Learning scientists by presenting apractical example. After a short introduction, the real life setting is explainedand statistical data presented.

2 Microblogging, scientific communities, and Science 2.0

Twitter is the most famous, best known and also the very first micro-bloggingplatform. Micro-blogging can be seen as a new form of blogging activity and isdescribed by Templeton [19] as a small-scale form of blogging, generally made

up of short, succinct messages, used by both consumers and businesses to share

news, post status updates and carry on conversations. Owyang [15] describes thedifference between blogs and micro-blogs as follows: [...] long form blog posts

like this seem so much slower and plodding compared to how quickly information

can come and go in Twitter. [...] Information within Microblogging communities

[...] encourage rapid word of mouth – of both positive and negative content. In anutshell, micro-blogging offers a platform for the fast exchange of thoughts, ideasand artefacts. It must be pointed out that each message cannot be longer thana maximum of 140 characters and can put on the web easily. These messages,so-called tweets, can be public or private, can be directed to one or more Twitterusers (identified by the @ sign) and can deal with certain topics (identified bythe # sign). By using a hashtag in tweets it is easy to aggregate all tweetsdealing with the same topic. People who are following anyone are able to readthese tweets, are able to reply or to contact the author directly. However, thestrength of this new communication and collaboration platform is that sendingand reading messages is not restricted to a web interface, it can be done alsoby numerous desktop applications as well as by mobile phones. Latest statisticaldata pointed out that only “only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter

website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smart

phones or computers” [2].Communities in Twitter are forming through the usage of a common tag that

is part of the message. The CoPs on Twitter deal with brands (e.g. #apple), ed-ucational courses (e.g. #wekm09), conferences (e.g. #edmedia) or world-shakingevents like mass riots (e.g. #iranelection). By taking a closer look to Twitter itbecomes quite useful for the fast information exchange among a community ofpractice. Dealing with these ideas, that micro-blogging allows us to share, dis-cuss and collaborate online, Twitter was introduced to different scientific confer-

Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community 3

ences. A very first experiment at ED-MEDIA Conference 2008 pointed out thatthe Twitter stream can be used to display posts during the keynote speech [8]just in time. Further research also shows how people are using Twitter duringconferences by carrying out short surveys [17]. In this publication we like toconcentrate on practical experiences and point out how Twitter performs duringa live event.

3 Twitter at the ED-MEDIA 2009 conference

ED-MEDIA is an international conference on “Educational Multimedia, Hyper-media & Telecommunication”3 and started in 1993 as follow-up after 6 yearsof International Conferences on Computers and Learning (ICCAL). The mainpurpose as stated on the Webpage is to serve as a multi-disciplinary forum forthe discussion and exchange of information on the research, development, andapplications on all topics related to multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunica-tion/distance education. Nowadays it is certainly one of the largest internationalconferences on these topics. About 1000 participants every year attend numeroussessions and workshops for 5 days. Two very recent publications [11, 13] pointedout the huge amount of contributions, the relationship of authors, the key play-ers and lots of more trends. In 2008 for the very first time Twitter was used tosupport the conference by announcements and a live stream beside each keynotetalk [10]. This year, the micro-blogging channel should be much more opener byencouraging attendees to participate. Several hints to the Twitter stream weregiven beforehand the beginning of the conference as well as at the conference.

3.1 Analysis of the ED-MEDIA Twitter community

For analyzing the dynamics of the ED-MEDIA 2009 conference, we used ourtool twitterVisBT (see [16] for detailed information on the tool). The tool allowsmaking snapshots of the development of a community on Twitter on a regularbasis and analyzing the contents of the respective communication of the commu-nity. We started the monitoring of the hashtag #edmedia on 2009-06-18. Fromthat day on, we requested Twitter every hour for the latest tweets containing thishashtag and stored them in a local database. Figure 1 shows the developmentof the number of tweets that the Twitter community sent, using the hashtag#edmedia. Until 2009-06-30 1595 tweets containing the hashtag #edmedia weresent to Twitter and analyzed by our application. It is clearly visible that thereis a sharp rise in the number of tweets with the beginning of the conferenceworkshops and the actual conference4. The size of the ED-MEDIA Twitter com-munity grew from 10 users on 2009-06-10 to 177 on 2009-06-30, whereas theaverage daily increase of the network was 29.6% and the highest increase in thecommunity size was on 2009-06-24 with 87.8% growth.3https://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/, last visited August 2009

4 There are some interferences between the analysis date and the actual date a tweetwas sent due to the time difference of -12 hours between Hawaii and Germany.

4 Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt

Fig. 1. Number of tweets from the ED-MEDIA community on Twitter

During the storage of new tweets all occurring tags are saved and associatedwith the respective users as to make statistical statements later on. In order tomake these claims about the usage of Twitter and the dynamics of the commu-nication, we implemented a script that saves statistical data like the number oftweets or users that used the tag on a daily basis. Furthermore we used the Ya-hoo Term Extraction Web Service (TEWS)5 to extract the most relevant termsor phrases from the content of the tweets. The TEWS returns a sorted list ofrelevant terms and phrases, which represent the core of the daily conversation.

3.2 Visualization of the dynamics of the ED-MEDIA Twittercommunity

The main task of the twitterVisBT application is to track the changes withina community on Twitter (size of the community, members, other tags used,important terms and phrases) or for a single monitored user. Our visualizationis not useful for the use as live stream of communication. There are various othertools, which are specialized to do so. In order to make statistical claims aboutthe use of Twitter as a mean of communication it is sufficient to update the dataset once per hour or even once per day.

Figure 2 shows a section of the statistical part of the application. In part 2(a)it is pictured who are the main contributors to the communication in the Twitterchannel. that way it becomes obvious that the users @mebner and @walthernwere the most active users of the community and accounted for around 24% of5http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V2/termExtraction.html, lastvisited August 2009

Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community 5

the overall communication on Twitter. Figure 2(b) shows other tags that havebeen used together with the community-identifying tag #edmedia. From that itis noticeable that the Top 10 of other tags used can be classified in two groups:firstly location- and travel-related tags (e.g. #honolulu, #TravelToEdMedia)and secondly tags related to the themes of the conference (e.g. #HigherEd,#elearning, #mlearning).

(a) Visualizing users that employed thetag #edmedia

(b) Other tags that have been used to-gether with #edmedia

Fig. 2. Visualizing users and other tags used with the tag #edmedia

Besides the statistical data we try to extract and visualize the most importantterms and phrases from the daily tweets. The twitterVisBT tool holds a tab thatvisualizes the most important terms from the communication on Twitter in orderto trace the centers of attention. Therefore we are using a simple word cloudthat shows the more important words larger than the less important. Under thevisualization there is a slider wherewith one can go back in time to see the datafrom the past. Furthermore there is a play button that allows to automaticallybrowse through the daily summaries of the tweets sent6. Figure 3 shows twodynamic word cloud extracted from the tweets containing the hashtag #edmedia.Figure 3(a) show the extracted terms for 2009-06-24. Stephen Downes gave hiskeynote entitled “Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment”on that day and talked about media innovations and how social networks canbe incorporated in a PLE. Furthermore he talked about required technologicalskills and the use of media to close the gap between learners. Figure 3(a) clearlyrepresents the wide discussions on the keynote in the Twitter backchannel, butalso names of speakers (Erik Duval) or local places (molokai) can be identifiedfrom the tag cloud. The shown keywords have to be regarded with respect to thecontext where they emerged. For example, only because the two terms “Erik”“Duval” appear, it does not mean that these terms are relevant at all. Only in

6 For the ED-MEDIA 2009 there is a video of this automatic browsing available athttp://bit.ly/YfGiK.

6 Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt

(a) Key terms and phrases from #edmedia on 2009-06-24

(b) Key terms and phrases from #edmedia on 2009-06-25

Fig. 3. Visualizing the dynamics of communication of the ED-MEDIA Twitter com-munity

the context of the time, when the terms appeared most and the location indicatethe relevance.

The key terms for 2009-06-25 show the phrase bytestander effect as veryimportant. Nancy White posted a link on the topic and gained a lot of retweets,what made this topic so important. The terms social loafing and social actsbelong to a keynote of Richard Schwier entitled “Pursuing the elusive metaphor

of community in virtual learning environments”.

4 Discussion

Our research in [17] shows that the scientific community started to incorporateTwitter as important tool for communicating and exchanging thoughts, resourcesand continuative links. If we take a closer look to the scientific value of theTwitter use at the ED-MEDIA conference, than we have to separate between twomajor parts – on the one hand there are statistical data which allows a detailedinterpretation of trends, trend-setters or important topics. On the other handalso the question ”For which purpose Twitter was used during the conference?”occurs. It can be stated that Twitter was used in following different ways:

– exchange of different resources (hyperlinks, pictures, videos, ...),– exchange of social activities (sightseeing, journey towards and from the con-

ference venue),– documentation of conference activities (posters, slides, notes, ...),

Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community 7

– providing conference announcements,– possibility to give feedback or ask question to conference committees,– arrange short meetings,– discuss with people who are only participating online,– comments to talks, and– discussion about different people, presentations and topics.

If we take a closer look at the last two applications, there is a prominentexample from this year ED-MEDIA. On thursday, 2009-06-25 M. David Mer-rill gave his keynote entitled “What Makes e3 (effective, efficient and engaging)

Instruction?”, which was intended as tie between instructional and construc-tivist approaches for learning. The talk was tightly geared to instructional de-sign what attracted heavy discussions in the Twitter channel. The discussantswere scathing the old-fashioned instructional design and criticized that the top-ics were discussed already ten years ago. The discussion was visible to everyonebecause the stream was projected during the talk. The next speaker Tom Reevespicked up the discussion in his talk “Little Learning, Big Learning: In Defense

of Authentic Tasks” later on.

5 Conclusion and Outlook

In this publication the use of Twitter at one of the largest e-Learning confer-ences, the ED-MEDIA 2009 was carried out. Based on statistical analyses oftweets using the official conference hashtag (#edmedia) it was shown that thenumber of tweets increased arbitrarily during the conference as well as the num-ber of Twitter participants. Furthermore the top trend makers show who is theheartbeat of this online community and the key terms pointed out, what thecommunity was talking about.

We are just beginning to understand the application of Twitter in educationalsettings and scientific conferences. As shown above, participants used Twitter inmanifold ways from commenting, sharing, arranging and lots of other things. Itcan be concluded that the main intention of the very first beginning, to answerthe question “What are you doing?”, is simply overruled by the community andtheir creative ways to deal with microblogging platforms.

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