Uncategorized – Web Science MOOC

The Power of Social Media MOOC: starts Monday :-)

Lisa Harris — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 16:52:45 +0000

After weeks of planning and plotting, the MOOC is almost upon us…you can sign up here

Thanks are due to a large number of people who have contributed to the production process, in particular:

Kate Dickens and Manuel Leon from the Institute for Learning, Innovation and Development,

Sarah Hewitt, Nora Al-Rajeebah and Nic Fair, Web Science PhD students

Digital Champions Tim O’Riordan, Hannah Watts and Ashley Stout

Undergraduate Students Ellie Hamilton, Vicky Gilsen, Haley Fairclough and Rebekah Kulidzan

Southampton Alumni Emma Lester and Farahnoosh Berahman

To wet your appetite for Monday, Student Digital Champion Ashley Stout has created this lovely infographic to demonstrate the global nature of social networks: The Global Power of Social Media

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Interdisciplinary Week Events at Southampton

Lisa Harris — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 21:40:51 +0000

Locally-based MOOC participants may be interested in attending these events which take place in Interdisciplinary Research Week at the University of Southampton:

Trust truth and trolling from lisa harris

Coffee and muffins included :-)

Book a free place here

The Digital University from sotonDE

If you are not able to attend in person, check out #IDRW2014. Some events will be filmed, and all will be extensively tweeted by the team of Student Digital Champions.

We hope to see you there!

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Just one week to go…

Lisa Harris — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 11:04:11 +0000

…until the second running of the Web Science MOOC!

You can sign up via FutureLearn

The post Just one week to go… appeared first on Web Science MOOC.

The Virtual Choir

Lisa Harris — Wed, 25 Dec 2013 09:34:38 +0000

An end of MOOC present from the Web Science team, performed by Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir.

8409 videos featuring 5905 singers from 101 countries. Best played very loudly!

)

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Analysing the Network of #FLwebsci Tweets

Christopher Phethean — Sun, 17 Nov 2013 08:27:36 +0000

With the University of Southampton’s first MOOC on Web Science now coming up to its second week, work has been under way to promote and discuss the new course, and – in parallel with the MOOC’s focus on the Web – a lot of this has happened on social media. I recently ran a session with Digital Marketing MSc students at the University, who were asked to post messages promoting the MOOC to their own social networks. In a follow-up session, I presented some analysis on the use of the #FLwebsci hashtag on Twitter before the MOOC had started, to demonstrate the powerful effects of marketing through the social web.

Using a Tweet Harvester run by the University, and the open source graph visualisation software Gephi, I was able to collect all tweets containing ‘FLwebsci’ and produce the network image below (click on it to load a larger, more detailed version). The size of nodes (users) relates to their in-degree – or how many times a tweet containing the hashtag mentioned them or was a retweet of their own message. The colour of nodes relates to their out-degree – or how many times that user tweeted using the hashtag – blue nodes are a low number of tweets, white nodes slightly higher, and red nodes are the highest.

You can also view a PDF of this graph.

What is surprising here is that Simon Fogg (‘srjf’) who is a registered student on the course, appears as the ‘reddest’ node, showing that he has been enthusiastically tweeting about the course. He has also produced a Google+ community around the MOOC, to further develop its presence online. This has worked as a great supporting movement to the establishment of the MOOC, and to show this, a layout algorithm was run in Gephi to arrange nodes closer to those that they are connected to. As you can see below, ‘srjf’ is connected to a large number of nodes in the left hand side of the image, who would have otherwise not been included in the network at all. This demonstrates the effect that ‘srjf‘ has had on propagating news of the MOOC and the hashtag for it to new members of the community. This is a great example of how the combination of social media and enthusiastic, devoted supporters can open up and expand the audience of a particular brand, community or organisation. Thanks must go out to Simon for the excellent work he has been carrying out in promoting the MOOC and welcoming other learners.

There will be more discussions about how network visualisations can be used for social media analysis in Week 5 of the MOOC, so if you haven’t signed up yet but are interested in this topic then head over to Futurelearn to find out more!

More details of the methodology are available on my blog too

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