A Lovely Bloom of UDGAgora Hashtags

From our initial visits and surveys of participants, we knew twitter was not in wide use among the faculty participants of the UDG Agora project. We heard people mostly use Facebook, and WhatsApp for quick communication.

In our first meetings, we collecting some data for participant’s twitter awareness (this was only sent out the first week of our sessions, so crappy sampling size, about 1/3 the population)

1=I have never tweeted before, am brand new, or nervous about using twitter and 10=I am extremely experienced and tweet almost on a daily basis

So it seems kind of wild that we have tracked now 85 different twitter hashtags being used by our participants (data in google spreadsheet). Twitter does not provide us the basic data of how many times a hash tag has been used, but still, we have quite the garden:

generated by wordle.net just from the list of hastags

Or, as links…

#a2moviludg, #ad2015b, #administracionfinanciera2015b, #AdmonI15b, #adoptaunaobra2015b, #AMCuci, #Aprendo_cuanti, #APT15b, #ArgumentarEsComunicar, #bacterB02, #bacterB05, #BC111AA, #BZ108AA, #Calentamiento, #carruseltecnic, #ceraitesoadministracion2015b, #comculagos15, #Compo1Alvirde, #CompoVAgora, #comunicacionytecnologia, #construccionuno, #consumidorescualtos, #Control_Digital_CUValles , #CualtosIO2, #dcreativo, #DebatelaptovsPc, #desarrolloemprendedores2015b, #Dietética2015B, #Difuso_CUValles, #DIP2015B, #dispositivoariete, #ECONOMIAIICUALTOS, #educativaudgreto1, #educativaudgreto10, #educativaudgreto11, #educativaudgreto12, #educativaudgreto13, #educativaudgreto14, #educativaudgreto2, #educativaudgreto3, #educativaudgreto4, #educativaudgreto5, #educativaudgreto6, #educativaudgreto7, #educativaudgreto8, #educativaudgreto9, #EpistemologiaC, #EscritoriovsLaptop, #EscritoriovsLaptop, #eticalcp, #filoles15b, #finanzasVII2015b, #gdesl, #ift2015, #ift2015, #ITBGAI, #jardineria12015b, #matematicasycineciauno, #partestransitoelectronico, #practicarevenimiento, #practicatransito1 , #practicingenglishwithmemes, #practiquemosinglesCUC, #problemario3A, #problemario3B, #problemario3G, #problemario3G, #profatravesdelsuelo, #pronosticosypresupuestos2015b, #Proyecto1_CUValles, #proyhidraulicosistemas, #PYME15b, #quimitwiter, #recursoshumanos2015b, #retosCIA, #seminv2015, #SistemasOperativos, #Tconocimiento, #TeoriaDelEstadoCusur, #termoiq2015, #termoiq2015, #tvinstalacionesespeciales, #UDGEnglish, #udgift, #usxxi2015b

We did not start this by telling them how great twitter was. Or that it was important. Or that it was required.

Actually, it was first introduced as a way for them to track their work in the Challenge Bank (based on the ds106 assignment bank). Essentially, using twitter as a unique user name. This it enabled us to have a Leaderboard as a way to see who were the more active participants.

But then we offered twitter as a means for participants to respond to our Daily Try. We did have a few activities during our July face to face sessions where we asked for responses via twitter.

We used the #udgAgora hashtag across the board. Our TwitterTAGs data has over 7300 tweets using this hash tag, which I think is impressive even when you slice off 1500 that belong to us organizers.

We noticed as the projects started up that some faculty were having their students tweet to them, often including me, I get so many Spanish tweets with great photos of students doing various things, and I really have no idea what the activity is.

image from Public Domain images which, are in the public domain.

A week or so into our online part of the project, I assembled a studio with some suggested ways to “capture” or curate twitter activity – the flow of tweets is exciting, but it just flows away. The approaches I covered included ones we have used in the project. They are not mutually exclusive

• Martin Hawksey’s Twitter TAGS – this should be done for any use of a hashtag, get a full archive, and summary data, cool visualizations to boost (Challenge Assignment)
• Visible Tweets – for near realtime display of ongoing twitter activity, useful during events, see the one for #UdgAgora Some people find the animations nauseating. Oh well.(Challenge Assignment)
• TagBoard a great way to track hashtags across services- twitter, instagram, facebook, flickr. I think our UdGAgora Tagboard is quite gorgeous. (Challenge Assignment)
• Storify build annotated, arranged collections of not only tweets, but videos, images, web sites. (Challenge Assignment)

I do not know if any of these efforts can be said to be the cause of this uptake in twitter. We hope to find out more as the faculty begin compiling their results of their projects.

But 85 different uses of hashtags– that seems something to jump up and down about. #Yippee.

Top / Featured Image Credit: flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/16779230023 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license (there I go again, attributing my own photos, although I do not have to, I still do)

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