Twitter network for danah boyd JSB Symposium talk
Today's John Seely Brown Symposium had an active Twitter hashtag of #danahjsb. I imported the hashtag network* into NodeXL and had it draw up a graph for me (click the image for a giant BMP version):
#danahjsb network
Image size depends on the user's number of followers. Edge color depends on the kind of edge - yellow indicates a following relationship, blue a reply/mention relationship. Compare our graph to Marc Smith's graph of the #win09 hashtag users:
#win09 network
You'll notice a couple of things. First, Marc is better with NodeXL than I am, and his graph is just easier to read. Then, dig a little deeper and notice that the network of users who used the #danahjsb hashtag is more densely connected. The #win09 network is brokered by the guy in the middle, and the #danahjsb network has no obvious brokers. More to come on my thoughts about the symposium talk and panel, stay tuned.
* only users whose tweets are public are included in these network diagrams
More Info:
What the hashtag?! - view the tweets
Coming Soon - watch the symposium talk and panel
Relational Engagement in Project Teams
I participated in the ICOS dissertation poster session today, and while there had a number of helpful conversations about my dissertation. One of the preliminary findings I included on my poster discussed the perspective-taking and social language use I've noticed in interviews with members of the bridge project. Perspective-taking is a concept found in psychology literature, and it usually refers to our developed abilities to understand that other people have experiences different from our own. Some education researchers such as Hunter Gehlbach at Harvard use the idea of social perspective taking as a way to help students develop social skills. Linguists such as James Pennebaker at UT-Austin use the term social thinking to refer to language that indicates an awareness of other people.
In my data, members of the bridge building project indicate their perspective taking abilities and social thinking when they make comments such as
I would think that if you guys got involved with maybe [a community college], they have a concrete technology program up there. You could get a lot of free help with a lot of experiments up there, and they’re more than willing to work with concrete and do labs and anything you guys don’t like doing.
By saying, "I would think...," the interviewee indicates awareness that someone else might think something else. The speaker implies that there is more than one idea about what the listener ("you guys") might want to do. In other interviews, my participants express concern about the goals other members of the project have when they make statements such as, "Well, I know he's more concerned about cost." Here, the speaker explicitly tells us that he understand another person's concerns and knows their relative importance.
Why does it matter that my participants demonstrate perspective taking and use social language? Project teams that include people who respect and understand perspectives that differ from their own are more successful. By "more successful" I mean those teams are more likely to accomplish their goals, have positive affect and impressions of their work, and maybe even to work together again. The social aspects of the relational engagement that perspective taking produces eases tension and builds commitment among project team members, making it easier for project teams to work together smoothly. It may be that positive relational engagement - interactions among team members characterized by perspective taking and social thinking - is more important than project structure or timing. When we talk about projects, especially engineering projects, we often focus on how they should be managed at the project level; when should what get done, who should do it, to whom should that guy report. It may make more sense for us to focus on managing interpersonal relationships on the project team, developing trust and concern for one another. The way we relate to our project teammates is likely to have a huge impact on our ability to work together successfully.
Poster Printing
Grad students print a lot of posters. Every time this grad student tries, something goes horribly wrong. So, finally, I've documented a successful poster printing process, and now I'll share it with you.
Background Info:
Before you even begin to design your poster, make sure you know
- The dimensions your poster is allowed to be
- How wide the poster printer's paper is
- What file format the poster printer likes best
- Whether you will be allowed to install fonts on the computer from which you send your poster to the printer
Standard posters for conferences are often 36" x 48" or something close to it. Some poster sessions require portrait orientation, some landscape. Most poster printers on my campus (and at FedEx Kinkos) print on paper 42" wide. Poster printing is usually charged by linear foot. Most poster print shops use Windows PCs and Windows-based software to manage poster print jobs. Using a file format such as PDF with embedded fonts should ensure that your poster looks the same on a Mac and on Windows.
Now, you're ready to design your poster. Many people use PowerPoint. I am not one of those people. If you'd like help designing and printing a large poster in PowerPoint, go here instead. I use Inkscape, an open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape produces .SVG files and allows you to save in a variety of formats including .EPS, .PDF, and .AI. Inkscape is available for Mac, PC, and Linux. I'm a Mac user, so I use the Mac version.
The instructions below assume you have already finalized your design. I recommend designing a poster with edges no longer than 42" because that's the size of the poster printer's paper. By designing a poster that's 36" x 42" instead of 36" x 48", you'll save yourself a linear foot of printing cost and the hassle of trimming the extra paper off your poster. If you use another tool such as PowerPoint or Illustrator to design your poster, you can still use the instructions but start at #12.
I perfected these instructions using the poster printers, Macs, and PCs, available at the Tech Deck and Angell Hall computing sites at the University of Michigan. Both poster printing shops use HP printers. Both places also offer user support, and all the staff I worked with rocked! See special notes below about each of these poster printing sites.
The Instructions:
- Open your SVG file in Inkscape
- Go to
File -> Save As... - Choose EPS from the drop down at the bottom right
- Choose a location, probably a jump drive, to save your poster as a EPS
- Take your jump drive to a computer at the poster print shop that has Illustrator (I'd stick with a Mac at this point if you can)
- Open Illustrator
- Choose
New Print Documentand set the dimensions to the size of your poster - Choose
File -> Placeand select your EPS file - Quadruple check all the parts of your poster to make sure it looks right (See Note 1 for tips perfecting your poster in Illustrator)
- When it's perfect, save your poster as PDF. DO NOT print to PDF. SAVE AS PDF.
- Take your PDF on your jump drive over to a PC that can print to the poster printer
- Open the PDF
- Quadruple check your poster in Acrobat on the PC
- Send your poster to the poster printer (See Note 2 for details about appropriate settings in the print dialog box)
- Cross your fingers, and hope for the best
- Enjoy your perfect poster!
Note 1: Illustrator and File Formats
Where ever you print your poster probably uses Illustrator. Illustrator will be happy to make a nice PDF of your poster, and you may be able to go straight from placing your EPS file to saving as a PDF. If you use transparent fonts or have placed images from PowerPoint, you will have to make some adjustments. Changing the fonts should be easy enough - you can simply select the text and change its opacity. If you've placed an image from PowerPoint, and it looks wrong, go to PowerPoint, save as a PNG, and place the PNG using File -> Place in Illustrator.
Note 2: Setting Properties in the Print Dialog
You're using Windows because the print dialog box will let you adjust the settings appropriately. The Mac print dialog box will probably not work. Remember, these instructions are for HP poster printers (e.g. HP DesignJet 5500) So, in the print dialog box
- Select the poster printer from the drop down list of available printers.
- Click on the Properties button.
- In the Properties window, select the "Advanced" tab.
- Expand the Paper/Output selection and select "PostScript Custom Page Size" from the Paper Size: drop down menu.
- In the PostScipt Custom Page Size Definition window enter your document's height and width.
- If the longest edge of your poster is the width of the printer (in my case 42") or shorter, from the Paper Feed Direction: drop down menu select "Long Edge First."
- In the print window, verify that your document size is correct.
- Click the Print button to send your document to the printer.
Tech Deck Notes:
The Tech Deck uses some software on a PC directly attached to the printer. You can print directly from Illustrator on the Mac to the poster printer, and then you'll do your last quadruple checking over on the PC attached to the printer. Tech Deck staff will help you through all of this. You will pay for your poster at the Shapiro Undergraduate Library's Circulation desk.
Angell Hall Notes:
The Sites personnel may or may not be able to help you. The instructions above will work if you design your poster in Inkscape on a Mac, use a Sites Mac to make a PDF, and then use a Sites PC to print to the poster printer. After you click "OK" to print your poster, you must visit http://mprint.umich.edu/poster and release your job to the printer. Your student account will be billed for the cost of printing your poster.
Becoming Manifesto-y, Telling Stories
A couple weeks ago, my advisor counseled me to make the research statement I was writing for a job application "more manifesto-y." A few days later, we elected Barack Obama President of the United States, spurring at least one manifesto [story from the Boston Globe]. This week I have watched an embarrassing number of episodes of The West Wing on DVD. The characters on The West Wing are constanting publicly declaring their intentions. Today, my brother sent me a Tom Peters manifesto from ChangeThis. Manifesto seems to be the theme of my life for November.
man⋅i⋅fes⋅to
[man-uh-fes-toh]
–noun, plural -toes. a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization. (from Dictionary.com)
This definition from Dictionary.com seems to be missing some of the "flair" I normally associate with a manifesto. For me, a manifesto is not just any public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, but an energetic, empassioned public declaration. Without passion, it's just a statement.
Why blog this? Well, I'm worked up. My guy won the White House. A close friend wrote something that was entered into the Congressional record and may find a public outlet for other important work. My brother sent me something from non-academic workplace literature that made me sit up and pay attention while I read. President-elect Obama. We millions who voted for him. My friend the policy researcher. Tom Peters. These people made public declarations of their opinions and objectives, and they did so with passion.
It seems silly to compare those actions to the kind of effort my advisor asked me to use in my research statement. I don't think I really understood when she told me to "be more manifesto-y." I definitely improved my statement after that advice, but it did not turn into a research manifesto. It's probably too early in my career for me to be writing research manifestos. After all, I need some political capital in order to get a job. I don't have the protection of tenure to shield me in the event that my manifesto is unpopular.
I don't think my manifesto would be unpopular though. My manifesto would be about doing research that helps us change the world by working together. Research that helps us solve problems like AIDS, bioterrorism, crumbling civil infrastructure, and the uncertainty and pain of starting new careers. Those are the problems the people I study are solving. My research will be useful to them. My research will help us work together better. My research will help us organize our projects so that we can accomplish more together than on our own. My research will help us feel better about our work, about what we can accomplish, about our relationships with our colleagues. My research will enable us to get more from ourselves.
That is the research statement I can make here, on my blog, after regaining hope in my country, after watching my friends do their best to change the world, after reading about how to succeed. I make it here because it's not appropriate for my job packet. I make it here because while reading #17: Work on Your Story in Tom Peters' manifesto, I was reminded of my frustrations about presenting and discussing academic work. Tom Peters claims that "he/she who has the best story wins!" He claims that telling stories is better than simply giving presentations. I am a great story teller. Ask my friends or the people who come to my parties. My friend Caroline, for sure, will vouch for me. I want so much to believe Tom Peters that being a storyteller will help me succeed. The trouble is, I'm not sure my audience can handle it. I'm not sure my conference presentations go over that well when I try to be a storyteller. I know reviewers get frustrated when I don't stick to intro, method, results, discussion and bullet points. I'm pretty sure a hiring committee would rather I send them the statement I did than something like the paragraph before this one.
Am I asking too little of my conference audiences, of those hiring committees? Would I be better off if I showed them the passion I have for the study of collaboration? I'm not sure. I do know I want to be more manifesto-y. The stories about the work I've done and seen could inspire. I don't know who would listen to them though. I don't know what audience would match my energy. The dry, monotonous style of academic publishing, both in print and at conferences, does not lend itself to manifesto. We academics are reserved; sometimes we are cynical. When I'm all worked up like this, that reservation, that cynicism is troubling. I see some value in a cold, passive, rational approach. I do. Just not tonight.
Call for Participation – ICLS Workshop
I'm hosting a workshop at ICLS 2008 with Stephanie Teasley, Volker Wulf, Eric Cook, and Jude Yew - The Missing Chapters: Learning Sciences Beyond the Classroom.
This workshop will provide momentum toward building a community of Learning Sciences researchers who focus on learning that takes place in non-traditional contexts with learners of any age. Our goal is to bring together researchers who might otherwise be on the fringe of learning sciences to discuss their work and help generate publications appropriate for new chapters in the next Handbook of the Learning Sciences or a special issue of a Learning Sciences journal.
More information about the workshop is available on our blog.
Stovepipes and how they confuse and frustrate
The title of this post suggests a treatise more than a lowly blog post, but, I'm a busy proposal writer, so I'll have to settle for the post. A friend sent me a link to a Gartner newsletter yesterday, and the title was "It's official. Collaboration is a top business priority." That's good news for me since I'm a collaboration researcher. It's nice to know collaboration is a priority for someone besides me. I clicked through the newsletter and even visited the website for a conference Gartner is hosting called the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.
I use "stovepipes" to refer to the isolated, vertical towers of thought and work into which we've organized ourselves. I think I picked it up while serving on SI's dean search committee where we spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted to avoid stovepipes in SI. We're an interdisciplinary school, and we wanted to recommend a dean who would encourage intellectual respect and collaboration among the disciplines rather than stovepiping them. Ok, so, now I'm concerned about the stovepiping that happens between academia and the business world. This is not a new concern for me, but it's one I haven't written down for public consumption yet. It worries me that a summit like Gartner's can take place and that academia neither talks about it nor attends. I don't mean to imply that Gartner's summit is the be-all, end-all and that it's going to change the world forever, but it could be something interesting. It concerns me that when I wanted to study newcomers in an organization, I was thwarted by lack of connections to organizations. Instead, I ended up studying newcomers to an academic environment and then interviewing (a year later) for a serendipitous opportunity to study newcomers in a public company. Man, I hope I get that internship. I digress.
The divide between academic research and business research seems to be growing. Is it growing? Am I just more attuned to it now than I have been? What can I do to get more connected to businesses so that I can learn from them, and so that my work can have some real world impact? I don't want to be a messiah with academic knowledge; I want to get my hands dirty outside the lab. What would the cost to my academic reputation be if I were to focus on collaborations with industry researchers and managers? Where is the tunnel between the stovepipes?
Stovepipes aside, Gartner's summit has one of the most male-dominated presenter lists I've seen in a quite a while. I hope overall that their company is more diverse. That said, I'm curious about the summit. I do wonder what collaboration technologies are on the horizon. I'll be paying attention, for sure.
iConference Roundtable
Sean Munson and I will be hosting a roundtable discussion at the iConference at UCLA in February. The preconference wiki is up and ready for your contributions. Here's the description of the roundtable:
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Professional students, whether undergraduates or masters’ students, represent a significant portion of the iSchool community. How do iSchools effectively educate those students while continuing to develop successful research programs? This roundtable discussion will focus on how iSchools educate their professional students and engage them in the research aspect of their programs. Innovative approaches to training and integration will be the central theme of this discussion. In an iSchool – where students training for professions including librarianship, information policy, human-centered computing, preservation and researchers exploring such topics as incentive-centered design, forensic informatics, computational linguistics, and digital libraries have both competing and complimentary goals – the potentials for collaboration, innovation, misunderstanding, and disharmony are all high.
The annual iConference provides a unique opportunity for us, as a community, to discuss the roles our professional students have in shaping our identity and our practices. The proposed roundtable will invite participants to discuss questions such as:
* What should the role of research in training information professionals be?
* How can we best engage professional students in our research?
* How do iSchools address the unique curricular challenges we face in preparing students for a very wide variety of careers?
* What do we want an Information degree to signal in the marketplace?
* What are some successes in which research and professional training have benefited one another?
Participants will share innovative approaches to professional education, best practices in engaging professional students in research programs, and remaining challenges. We intend roundtable participation to represent the diversity of iSchools’ current programs. Confirmed participants include:
* Dr. Eileen G. Abels, Master's Program Director, Associate Professor, College of Information Science & Technology, Drexel University
* Dr. Judith S. Olson, Richard W. Pew Collegiate Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Information, University of Michigan
Each speaker will present introductory remarks highlighting some of the achievements and challenges they face in their home programs, after which discussion will include questions and input from the attendees. This will be an interactive forum proposing ideas for new approaches to education and integration of professional students. We encourage participants to discuss ideas that work (and those that don’t!) in their schools. We will create and publicize a wiki space for pre- and post-conference participation as well.
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We're hoping that Beth Mynatt from Georgia Tech will also join us and talk a bit about their successes. We'd love to have anyone interested in professional students and information research to join our discussion both online and in Los Angeles. The preliminary schedule of the conference indicates that our roundtable will take place sometime on Friday, February 29.
Explaining myself to technology product groups
I have a meeting tomorrow with a leader of a product group at a Silicon Valley-based household name. On the itinerary, I'm described as "a PhD student who has worked on use of social media and etc. by science and engineering research groups". I've been asked to come up with a 3-5 minute introduction for myself. Here's my rough draft:
Your itinerary shows that I’ve worked on social media use by science and engineering communities. Another way to think about what I do is to call it social computing for existing (or emerging) social systems. My work is with distributed teams, and it’s different from much of the existing ecommunity work because the teams I study know each other. They may not be close socially or geographically, but they are familiar with each other and have almost always met face-to-face. They’re working together toward some goal that requires them to collaborate (e.g. getting a new building technology to market) or benefits greatly from collaboration (e.g. getting through grad school). They span a variety of distributions – whether their offices are states or continents apart, whether their disciplines seem distant, and how they span the spectrum from novice to expert.
Two of the projects I work with now that explore the use of social computing by existing communities are the CI TEAM grant and KNOW SI. In the CI TEAM grant we explore how engineers developing and testing a new building material work together across institutional and national boundaries to establish standards for testing the material and for training new users of the material. The CI TEAM group uses a content management system with features somewhat like Yahoo! Groups to share their data and discuss it. CI TEAM builds on earlier large-scale scientific collaborations that used the same tools but had very different motivations and goals for collaboration. What I’ve found most interesting in these scientific research collaboration projects is how unlikely users are to adopt a technology specifically for their projects. Users love email and Excel but ignore wikis, archived email lists, and file repositories.
KNOW SI is a PhD student-led project with many goals. Mine is to use KNOW SI as a way to understand how people in organizations, such as schools, use available technologies to share information with one another. In KNOW SI, I helped set up an iterative series of wikis for use by the community, and we’re analyzing that use and preparing the next generation wiki. What’s surprised me here is how willing various groups are to use the same underlying technology. For example, doctoral students are all over the wiki. We’re our own audience though. The Research and Career Services offices have different audiences – master’s students and the public for two – but are exploring the same technology.
Together these projects provide a variety of settings for me to explore information and technology use in different kinds of collaborations.
So what did we say? Our talk notes from GROUP 2007
Ask and you shall receive. Here is the text from which Jude and I spoke during our talk at GROUP this year. We said more than is here, but you get the gist. Thanks to everyone who stayed off the beach long enough to see our presentation!
Slide 1: Title
Welcome to Twiki and WetPaint: 2 wikis in academic environments. If you've read the paper, you'll know some of what we'll talk about today, but most of our discussion will center around analysis we've done since the Note deadline. We'll describe the process through which Twiki became KNOW SI and then tell you a bit about what happens (or happened) on each wiki, and we'll end with a group of questions we're planning to explore. What we're presenting today is some history about those two wikis and some information about our theoretical work.
Slide 2: diagram of projects
TWiki and KNOW SI are part of a larger research project on organizational knowledge and the use of wikis. We're not building just theory or just building wikis.
Slide 3: screenshots of lots of wikis
We chose to study these wikis because they're likely places for users to find and share information about and relevant to their communities.
Slide 4: Meet the Twiki
Started in June of 2005 and first used by a single research group and a few master's level classes, meet the Twiki. Twiki is still operational, but it's only remaining active users are the research group that who adopted it. Not surprisingly, the sysadmin is in that research group. Libby got to know Twiki as a GSI (Michigan's fancy term for TAs) for a course that used the Twiki.
Slide 5: 504 Twiki
That class kept discussion section notes and shared links and extra information on the Twiki. The most common complaint about the class as a whole was that the Twiki was "impossible to use" and "too confusing to be helpful." That so many students felt strongly about something peripheral to their class clued us in more acutely to the twiki's usability issues.
Slide 6: Special markup
required by the Twiki was at worst an insurmountable barrier and at best a mild nuisance for users. That class was during fall semester 2005.
Slide 7: Foosball (sept 2005)
Doctoral students, in general, were the most frequent editors of both wikis, and their wiki use started with the Twiki in September 2005 with the all-important Foosball Ladder information. We have a foosball table in our building, and we started tracking foosball competitions the same summer the Twiki was born. Other pages on the Twiki that started early include
Slide 8: Doctoral Resources (sept 2005)
Doctoral resources; a long page of resources for writing, getting funding, analyzing data, other stuff important to doctoral students' work.
Slide 9: Conferences (nov 2005)
Another long page, this one about conferences that people from SI have attended. Each paragraph contains information about the conference including when it was last held, who's gone, and what it's about.
Slide 10: Field prelims (summer 2006)
A small group of students working on their prelims used the Twiki to keep each other up to date on progress, to share time lines.
Slide 11: Fishing for info
Doctoral students were frequent Twiki editors; most Master's students disappeared after their classes ended. PhD students used the Twiki to tell each other about their work, to share info about conferences, and to archive community information like foosball prowess. A little over a year later, some students
Slide 12: Eating food
were eating food and talking about wikis. Discussions for a new, more usable, easier to find wiki began. Isn't that the way many interesting projects start? Anyway, it was time for a new wiki platform.
Slide 13: WetPaint
we chose WetPaint as the 2.0 platform because it promised to be ridiculously easy to use and sported a WYSIWYG editor reminiscent of our favorite (or not so favorite) word processor. The WetPaint wiki also got a new nick name - KNOW SI - Knowledge Networked on a Wiki for SI.
Slide 14: KNOW SI
KNOW SI started with seeds - content grabbed from the TWiki's active, public, whole community pages such as
Slide 15: Conferences (KNOW SI)
Conferences, and
Slide 16: Doctoral Resources (KNOW SI)
Doctoral resources. This page has grown
Slide 17: Doctoral resources navigation
into a large section that now has 14 pages including
Slide 18: What I Learned
What I learned - a page started by a doctoral student who had defended and accepted a tenure-track job. He enlisted other recent grads to make an interesting page of advice.
Slide 19: Papers by SI Students
Papers by SI Doctoral Students - a one-stop shop for finding papers we've written; skimming it gives you a sense of the breadth of work we do at SI. The papers page is an example of a kind of behavior that's been used a few times to generate wiki content - a student sent out
Slide 20: Emilee's email
an email letting people know the page existed and offered to post others' papers.
Slide 21: Papers original version
That email generated this first version - 1486 words.
Slide 22: papers history
Then, the page grew as more students added their own papers. Other KNOW SI pages such as a blog list and auto mechanic recommendations started similarly; one person got a bunch of information from many people, created a page, and then let it lose for the community to update. We'd seen the same thing with the original doctoral resources page on the Twiki; this one just gets a lot more action.
Slide 23: question marks
So that whirlwind tour shows you some of what we see on both wikis. What does any of this tell us? People are using the wiki, or at least trying, to do a number of things including
Slide 24: What I learned; Conferences for SI Types
Give advice
Slide 25: Foosball, basketball, grilling
Store, or point to, information about activities in the community
Slide 26: Good Mechanics
Aggregate and store information
Slide 27: making sense of wiki use
A couple theories help us analyze those behaviors - one of them is transactive memory.
Slide 28: Transactive memory
In this project we look at transactive memory as part of organizational knowledge
transactive memory - a theory of organizational memory, by Wegner (1986) that suggests knowledge within an organization/group is distributed among the group and that individual members can serve as memory aids to each other. One key to transactive memory is being able to build a shared understanding of "who knows what". For instance, if I wanted to get baseball tickets in Michigan, chances are likely that I will turn to Libby for help because I know that she is a major baseball fan.
Slide 29: Newcomers and knowledge sharing
Such anecdotes and informal knowledge sharing are essential for newcomers to academic communities. Academic communities are highly dynamic environments with a high turnover of members every year or even semester. By knowing "who knows what", newcomers know who to approach for particular pieces of needed information.
Slide 30: Who knows what
One example of how the wiki supports this kind of "who knows what" investigation is that it keeps track of the authors of its content. For newcomers looking to learn about student organizations, the history of that particular page can tell them something about who might know about a particular organization.
Slide 31: Takeaways
We have two important findings from this first part of our study - people will use a wiki to share information relevant to transactive memory; they're more likely to use it if it's easy to use and you give them time.
Slide 31: What's next?
We've been careful to this point not to generalize from the use within SI, a bounded academic environment, to organizations in general or public wikis broadly. At this point, we're not prepared to make broad claims about wiki use in organizations. Rather, we're using the data we and theory we've generated and used thus far to move us along to another iteration and more chances to study organizations.
Slide 32: Questions?