ICTlogy

Social media content curation: tips, tricks and winning strategies
Chair: Jessica Winters, University of Groningen, Netherlands

What is good content? How to find good content? What to post where?

Mandy Reinig, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, USA

What is content curation? search, filter, sort and present content.

1. Spot it
2. Stock it
3. Share it

Curation is manually sourcing and posting content relevant to your niche and audience, while aggregation is automated feeds/content collected from using key words/phrases. Content curation takes more time.

Kellie McMullin, Nova Scotia Community College, Canada

Content curation strategy:

• Who is your target audience? Knowing your audience, their interests, is key.
• What are your goals? You have to have them, so that you can measure your performance and your impact: contact, inform, customer service, recruitment, branding, etc.
• What types of sources do you want to draw from?
• What content collection tools do you want to use?
• How often will you check for new content? It depends on the platform and, especially, on the goals. Consistency is key.
• Who will check for new content? It is not as important the who but consistency in who is in charge of it. Using students can be a good bet, as they often are the target audience themselves, are savvy on social media use.
• How often will you post the content?

Jessica Winters, University of Groningen, Netherlands

Posting on Facebook:

• Best length is 80 characters or less (80-130 characters). The goal is to tease the user to click on the link, not to make them read the whole stuff on Facebook.
• Visual: add a picture or a good video.
• As questions.
• Be authentic, be honest.
• Quality, not quantity. It is better to post once a day a good thing than posting noise several times a day.
• Content: pride (being a student at the uni, stuff about the university, local/regional news/information), current events (only the relevant ones), college-humor, student-related, famous people.

It is important to identify one’s social ambassadors.

Kellie McMullin, Nova Scotia Community College, Canada

Content curation tools: how to choose the right tool for you? It depends on your goals, your audience and the form of content (pictures, videos, articles) that you want.

• Keep content simple. Simple things is what people will read.
• Be real and relevant.
• Post your passion. Don’t post because something has to be posted.
• Student-produced material. And tag the students’ content!
• Contests.

Jessica Winters, University of Groningen, Netherlands

If you aim at recruiting international students, you have to be on the social media that they are using, the sites that are popular in their respective countries, with their cultural codes, in their language.

Using Hootsuite as a content curation tool, not only for social media, but also to follow/subscribe to RSS feeds.

Discussion

Q: What about sponsord posts on Facebook? Winters: they work a little bit better than regular posts, but not too much. You can do that every now and then, it is not very expensive, but it is not terrific.

Ismael Peña-López: what about content produced by faculty members? Winters: the problem with this content is not quality —which is good— but the focus, which is usually too narrow and addressed to a very specific/specialized audience.

Q: What about trolls? Winters: we usually ignore them and, in fact, students themselves will many times fight them back.

Stepping into a new era
Jan Muehlfeit, Chairman of Europe Microsoft Corporation

What is technology today? What is and what is not technology? A new Mercedes has 16 computers in it and 60% of the whole budget is related to these computers. So, what is Mercedes building, cars or something else? Technology is deeply transforming most businesses, related or not with technology.

The more technology we have, the more a commodity it will become. And, thus, the more important human capital or human potential will be. Is the educational system preparing students so that they can develop their potential?

School, and society at large, is obsessed with the things that do not work, with what is wrong, with failures. We should be devoting more time and energies not to weaknesses but to strenghts: the development of people should focus on the strenghts of these people and not in trying to develop (in vain) their weaknesses. And this development should be based on self-awareness, on knowing who you are and what you can and/or want to do.

We need a new education model. Technology will change education in three ways at least:

• Enabling individual learning.
• Learning will be much more global.
• Learning will be collaborative.

How to change things? Leadership is not about the what and how, but about the why, about having and sharing a vision. Managers can motivate, but leaders can inspire.

Discussion

Q: What should universitties do? Muehlfeit: the major gap in education today is we don’t teach self-awareness, so that we don’t understand who we are and, thus, we don’t understand the others or the world. We have to learn from young people.

Q: How should we do that? Muehlfeit: we have to apply technology to all aspects of life.

Q: How do we let people that are inspired or that have a vision to advance? Muehfeit: Decide, act, follow what you are doing and correct according to your observations. And we can help people in these four steps: helping them to decide, to take action, to follow and monitor their acts and to react and correct.

Game On! Gamifying international student recruitment.
Justyna Giezynska, Studybility; Joachim Ekström, Uppsala University; Yu-Kai Chou, The Octalys Group.

Justyna Giezynska

4 aspects of innovation:

• Recognized need;
• Competent people with relevant technology;
• Financial support;
• Understangind needs.

Innovation requires governance, management and financing (the Golden Triangle of innovation).

Gamification is an engaging process. Gamification in student recruitment can help in raising awareness on your programme, can increase enrolment, can work on retention, can lead to knowledge growth and sharing, etc.

Yu-Kai Chou

Everyone has the capacity to enjoy games. And games can get people to voluntarily do hours of secret grunt work (called "grinding" in the gaming context) voluntarily and even enjoying it. Let’s think of gamification as "human-focused design", as opposed to "function focused design": a system that is designed to optimize for the motivation sand feelings of the human inside, instead of assuming the people within are robots that will complete the task.

There is more in gamification than points, badges and leaderboards (the PBLs). The social part of social media is about engagement, just like in gamification. In gamification one has to start with the Core Drives, not the Game Elements: how do I want my users to feel, and not what are my users going to do.

Core drives:

• Epic meaning & calling. Can relate with a certain (positive) degree of elitism.
• Development & accomplishment. Goals, acknowledgement..
• Empowerment of creativity & feedback. Create, provide feedback, fix things, start again. An improvement/virtuous cycle.
• Ownership & possession. Virtual gifts, virtual currencies. But also customization, personalization.
• Social influence & relatedness. Care about the group and being part of it. Group quests.
• Scarcity & impatience. You want something just because you can’t have it.
• Unpredictability & curiosity.
• Loss & avoidance. You do something to avoid a loss or something bad to happen.

Left brain, extrinsic motivation: accomplishment, ownership, scarcity…
Right brain, intrinsic motivation: empowerment, social influence, unpredictability…
Meaning and avoidance belong to both kinds of motivation.

Extrinsic motivation usually kills intrinsic motivation and vice-versa. E.g. we have an intrinsic desire to learn… which gets spoiled when we have to do it for marks or a certificate

Stages or facets of a game: status, access, power, stuff.

Joachim Ekström

• Be clear about what you need.
• Reward good behaviour.
• Know how to handle abuse.

Can gamification (doing "funny things") affect negatively your brand? The difference on impact or on engagement may be the one between explicit and implicit gamification. Sometimes it’s better to use implicit gamification strategies rather than inviting people to play in a straightforward way.

Discussion

Q: What would you change in universities? Yu-Kai: the problem with the university system —which is broken— is that extrinsic motivation is killing intrinsic motivation. Partly because the things that we have to learn are very much complex, much more complex than in the past. Maybe technology —and/or gamification— could have a role on simplifying things (without necessarily having to trivialize it). And once things are a little bit simpler, then motivation can come back. It is urgent that education provides a purpose for what is learnt, so that the student can have a feeling of accomplishment (different from a feeling of having successfully performed at the exams).

Q: How to use gamification for international students recruitment? Yu-Kai: motivation is the key, what motivates a person to go to your school? Is it scarcity? Is is ownership? How do we make it an epic quest? What about creating a game to help people figure out what they want to do with their lives?

Working in the field of open social innovation, and most especially when one considers institutions as platforms for civic engagement, it is almost unavoidable to think of the personal learning environment (PLE) as a useful tool for conceptualising or even managing a project, especially a knowledge-intensive one.

Let the definition of a PLE be a set of conscious strategies to use technological tools to gain access to the knowledge contained in objects and people and, through that, achieve specific learning goals. And let us assume that a knowledge-intensive project aims at achieving a higher knowledge threshold. That is, learning.

The common — and traditional — approach to such projects can be, in my opinion, simplified as follows:

• Extraction of information and knowledge from the environment.
• Management and transformation of information and knowledge to add value.
• Dissemination, outreach and knowledge transmission.

These stages usually happen sequentially and on a much independent way one from another. They even usually have different departments behind.

This is perfectly valid in a world where tasks associated to information and communication are costly, and take time and (physical) space. Much of this is not true. Any more. Costs have dropped down, physical space is almost irrelevant and many barriers associated with time have just disappeared. What before was a straight line — extract, manage, disseminate — is now a circle… or a long sequence of iterations around the same circle and variations of it.

I wonder whether it makes sense to treat knowledge-intensive projects as yet another node within a network of actors and objects working in the same field. As a node, the project can both be an object — embedding an information or knowledge you can (re)use — or the reification of the actors whose work or knowledge it is embedding — and, thus, actors you can get in touch trough the project.

A good representation of a project as a node is to think of it in terms of a personal learning environment, hence a project-centered personal learning environment (maybe project knowledge environment would be a better term, but it gets too much apart from the idea of the PLE as most people understands and “sees” it).

A very rough, simple scheme of a project-centered personal learning environment could look like this:

Scheme of a project-centered personal learning environment
[Click to enlarge]

In this scheme there are three main areas:

• The institutional side of the project, which includes all the data gathered, the references used, the output (papers, presentations, etc.), a blog with news and updates, collaborative work spaces (e.g. shared documents) and all what happens on social networking sites.
• The inflow of information, that is data sources, collections of references and other works hosted in repositories in general.
• The exchange of communications with the community of interest, be it individual specialists, communities of learning or practice, and major events.

These areas, though, and unlike traditional project management, interact intensively with each other, sharing forth information, providing feedback, sometimes converging. The project itself is redefined by these interactions, as are the adjacent nodes of the network.

I can think at least of three types of knowledge-intensive projects where a project-centered personal learning environment approach makes a lot of sense to me:

• Advocacy.
• Research.
• Open social innovation (includes political participation and civic engagement).

In all these types of project knowledge is central, as is the dialogue between the project and the actors and resources in the environment. Thinking of knowledge-intensives projects not in terms of extract-manage-disseminate but in terms of (personal) learning environments, taking into account the pervasive permeability of knowledge that happens in a tight network is, to me, an advancement. And it helps in better designing the project, the intake of information and the return that will most presumably feed back the project itself.

There is a last reflection to be made. It is sometime difficult to draw or even to recognize one’s own personal learning environment: we are too used to work in projects to realize our ecosystem, we are so much project-based that we forget about the environment. Thinking on projects as personal learning environments helps in that exercise: the aggregation of them all should contribute in realizing:

• What is the set of sources of data, bibliographies and repositories we use as a whole as the input of our projects.
• What is the set of specialists, communities of practice and learning, and major events with which we usually interact, most of the times bringing with us the outputs of our projects.

Scheme of a personal learning environments as the aggregation of knowledge-intensive projects
[Click to enlarge]

Summing up, conceiving projects as personal learning environments in advocacy, e-research and open innovation can help both in a more comprehensive design of these projects as in a better acknowledgement of our own personal learning environment. And, with this, to help in defining a better learning strategy, better goal-setting, better identification of people and objects (resources) and to improve the toolbox that we will be using in the whole process. And back to the beginning.

Mobile Learning Experience: mShools
Roser Cussó

• Improve learning with mobile technologies, encourage learning with mobile.
• Mobile learning awards: acknowledge didactic improvements applying mobile technologies in the classroom.
  
• Mobile history map.
• Visits to the Mobile World Centre.
• Responsible usage of mobile technology.
• Improve digital skills and promote digital enterpreneurship: a 105h course whose goal is building an app with App Inventor, collaboratively, mentored by tutors in the industry (Moodle with resources). Almost 6,000 students followed the course, +250 teachers, +250 centres, +200 mentors. The training of trainers will now be a MOOC.
• Build and open environment for mEducation.
• mSchools Market.
• mSchools Lab.
• mSchools Mobile4all

Round table on the Internet, Privacy and Education
Chairs: Genís Roca

Q: How can we approximate people that shaped their lives “the traditional way” (with books, with intimacy) in this new age? What happens with the digital divide? Sibilia: yes, there is a generational bias, but the market is approaching them (for profit purposes, of course) to get them in the new way of life. And, on the other hand, the connected self, the networked subjectivity is trendy, and valued by society, which also helps in bringing in outsiders. Camps: leapfrogging is possible in certain areas and this is also contributing to bridge some divides.

Q: What happens with the Internet creating new opportunities and spaces of freedom, but also causing a “panopticon effect” where everybody can be watched at, especially by governments, loss of intimacy, etc. Sibilia: not sure that this is the creation of the Internet, but more a strengthening of previous practices. What we are now living is more the consequence of some social fights and achievements of the past, especially those related with the libertarian ethos of 1968. But something went wrong or did not end totally well. A parallelism can be found in Latin America and their different revolutions and counter-revolutions: they also are the aim for a change, for achieving new roles, but with very different outcomes. But they all come from the same root. We are now having serious problems imagining an alternative to capitalism: the market also got networked, and got into some spaces whose entry was forbidden to it: the body, the school, etc.

Q: we have to vindicate a change of paradigm from learning to learning how to learn, how to manage knowledge, how to build one’s own network of people and resources. And this is the role that libraries have always performed and are nowadays focussing more in. Camps: we have to teach how to look for alternative sources of information.

Natàlia Cantó: what lies in between the walls vs. networks dichotomy? Is there a room in between for the urban landscape, for the city? Sibilia: yes, the Benjaminian approach of the flanneur is a very interesting one and it is part of the escape from the walled spaces. But maybe open spaces are the opposite to walled spaces, but what is the opposite, or the complement to the network? How do we scape (or disconnect) the network? Or can’t we? We sure have to thing about that. For instance, the different use of the Network is being done in different protests and demonstrations, which is not exactly the pattern of self-promotion, showing-up or lack of intimacy/privacy which seemed to be the (new) norm.