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?

Growing affordable access to Information and Communication Technologies have seriously questioned the need for telecentres in recent years (read telecentres as any kind of public access points, from libraries to cybercafes). After some times of hesitation, it does seem to be an increasing agreement that, far from becoming useless, telecentres are serving a second wave of citizen needs related to accessing ICTs. Thus, the provision of digital literacy and digital skills to fight a second level digital divide, and the provision of relevant content and services are displacing what before was the domain of (mere) physical access to technology.

It seems just natural to think that if the goals and means of the telecentre change, so should its organization.

I would like to propose here that this change of organization should be built upon three main pillars:

• Being part of and contribute to a network or series of networks.
• Establishing win-win partnerships with other agents (public and/or private).
• Building communities.

Being a network

Let’s state the fact that every telecentre is a world, as it needs to adapt itself to the community it is embedded on: culture, socioeconomic profiles, social and individual needs, etc. all determine (or should determine) what the telecentre does and what the telecentre is. Nevertheless, there are several aspects of a telecentre that do scale: creating some generic or basic content, some certain solutions that can be easily adapted, some managing stuff… There is quite some evidence that telecentres that belong to a network have a higher probability of surviving in the long run. For instance, by outsourcing (some) telecentre administration and thus diminishing some costs.

But networks are not only made of similar institutions: there may be institutions that could benefit from the telecentre’s knowledge but that will never approach their venue. Insourcing telecentres into organizations creating into them ICT centres managed by the telecentre is another way to gaining both sustainability and meaning by beig part of a network.

Mapping the new telecentre: networks

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Establishing partnerships

Many institutions need to boost their services and content in a digital and online way; many telecentres, with a strong presence in a digital or online world need relevant services and content in which to embed training on digital competences and skills. It just looks natural that a partnership will be highly valuable for everyone’s purposes. Partnerships with governments in the field of e-government or ICTs and education, or partnerships with the private sector in the field of e-commerce or strategic consultancy can be good places where to begin.

More important, indeed, these partnerships can provide a mix of not-for profit or subsidised and for-profit activity, depending on the target user, the nature and goals of the partnership, etc. Telecentres should not avoid charging for some services (many already do) with the idea of providing a wide range of products, letting the user to chose what and how much — instead of the telecentre deciding for the user.

Mapping the new telecentre: partnerships

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Community building

It is common knowledge that the telecentre should adapt itself to the place where it is based. And it is also common knowledge in development studies that there is no sustainable development if it is not endogenous, that it, if it not build upon a community — or builds a community, and empowered one.

But there are several ways to do so. Networks and partnerships are a part of it. But it kind of is doing things from the outside: what telecentres would surely need — and libraries, and schools, and civic centres, and… — is being the community, that is, not helping others, but being themselves. It is not usually so: when we speak about e-inclusion we still see it with split roles: telecentres and ICTs on the one hand, the rest of the community on the other one. Working together, yes, but not merged one with another.

I believe that we should shift from the ICT Centre to the Centre-with-ICTs. Civic centres (with a normalized use of ICTs) and schools (with a normalized use of ICTs) are good examples of community based “centers-with-ICTs”. Of course, teachers would perform one role, and telecentre staff another one, but the important thing is that everyone believes that there is not such a thing as telecentre staff embedded in the school, but people working for education with the help of ICTs. Living labs (with a normalized use of ICTs) and centres or communities for social entrepreneurship (with a normalized use of ICTs) are other centers-with-ICTs, this time based on local entrepreneurs.

Mapping the new telecentre: communities

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Here is where the telecentre becomes a virtual telecentre: has the functions and roles of a traditional telecentre, operates in a network of virtual telecenters, and outsources much of its administration (to the network or to the hosting institution), thus being able to concentrate on its specific tasks and goals. But it does not any more rely or focus on physical access to technology. It’s the function, not the place, what’s in its name.

My colleagues Mariluz Congosto, Pablo Aragón and I just got a paper published. It is the final, improved version of a research that had already been presented thus:

(more…)

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
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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
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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.