As Laura James said, the project was presented at the Sakai Conference in Boston. Preparing a 45 minute presentation is surprisingly harder as it seems. I was glad we had so much time to present it, but even 45 minutes still didn't seem to be enough to present everything...There's just too much to say about this interesting project!

When doing the presentation, people seemed to react really enthusiastic about it. Some people were familiar with bits from the used methodology like personas or scenarios, but were surprised by the colourful walls covered in post-its notes and the fact lots of methods were now used all together. Some people seemed to recognize themselves in the personas! Cool! Others made some interesting comments, like: "At this moment, those 3 personas seem to be the right set of presentation for those people, but people behaviours change, so it might be possible that there are new behaviours and also new personas coming up within X years. How would we adapt the system to those differences?" Definitely worth thinking about I would say!

Interested having a look at the slides we used during the presentation?
> Sakai PowerPoint presentation

Some people were so interested in our personas (or simply in the methodology of creating personas), so we promised to share them.
Are you also desperately longing to have a look at our personas or scenarios? Then don't hesitate to have a look!
> Personas, scenarios and the methodology of creating a persona

Documenting, documenting, documenting!

Everyone knows documenting can take a lot of your time. I've been busy for some time now and still I have the feeling we've not covered everything. Sure, these documents are mainly to make sure we're not forgetting anything because it's so easy to forget about something. This means they're actually still more drafts than final documents.

Beside some general writing ups, Tjhien, Oszkar and I thought about writing the whole methodology up within google.docs which didn't seemed to be ideal afterwards but is still helpful if you need to write things up in a collaborative way. We tried to cover all the details in this draft document and we ended up with...more than 100 pages! Really, you don't WANT to read this yet. It's still a draft.

We learned a lot though, even just by documenting. For example: It's really hard to explain certain methods through the medium 'text'. So we tried to start making simple videos of some methods we used.

They're not yet finished, but these are some examples to give you an idea:

How we did task-goal analysis (Research phase):
During the research phase, we wrote down the things participants mentioned during the interviews. We captured this in an unusual but extremely helpful way, being: writing down every entry on colour-coded post it notes. Like this it would be easier to sort this information afterwards. Just have a look how we did that.

> full version of the video with some more information and details
> video restricted to Task-goal analysis


How we did user testing (Design phase):
We made some designs of concepts and of course, we wanted to test them with real people to see how they would react on them. Are we still doing the right thing? Therefore, we used a double mirrored room with in one room the participant and a facilitator and in the other room the people who would observe and analyze the data. During the first iteration, participants were looking at paper prototypes of the designs (which you can see in this video) and in the second iteration, they looked at wire frames visible on a real screen.

working with Sakai

We last posted when in the throes of our design phase, with iterations of prototyping and user testing - very intense. We managed one round of conceptual design, paper prototype testing with users, a design combination and refinement, wireframe testing with users, and then final refinement.

We are now very proud to have a set of wireframes for one overall design concept which we have created through a full user-centric design process!

Since then we've been working on capturing our work and recording the details of what we have done, how others might do similar things, what results we've found and what we learnt, for future dissemination. The incredible density of activity through our research and user-centric design processes has lead to a huge amount of information, and crystallising that into forms which are useful to ourselves and others has been time consuming - but worthwhile.

We are also looking ahead to the next phases of our project; potentially another round of design and testing, and then integration of the system into new Sakai. Work on the backend engine of new Sakai ("K2") progresses apace, and we're also building some basic networking features into our user interface for Sakai3 as the first hint of what academic networking might become. This does not yet include the full power and excitement of the concepts this project is generating...

Meanwhile, the JISC Academic Networking project will be presenting in two sessions at the forthcoming Sakai conference in Boston, July 8-10th 2009. Look out for John Norman and Anne-Sophie de Baets there!

It's design time!

The blog has been somewhat quiet of late, as the Academic Networking team have been working mostly offsite through an intense 6 week user-centric design phase. Five weeks down, one (this one) to go!

Oszkar Nagy and Tjhien Liao have been working out of Flow Interactive's London offices, learning from the Flow team as they work. We have gone many phases already, which I can outline very roughly here:

1. figuring out requirements from the user research
2. initial ideation of many many small design concepts
3. placing those concepts on axes of "user benefit" and "technical difficulty" (this was a tricky one!)
4. working up over a dozen concept ideas into rich descriptions (a phase which generated such intriguing concept names as "Ballroom dancing" and "The Spy")
5. selecting 3 concepts and refining them into extreme examples reflecting the ideas we had
   
6. user testing some paper prototypes of the concepts
7. refinement of the concepts based on user feedback, plus some work to bring them in from the extremes to something more mainstream
8. a second round of user testing

It's been a real whirl for everyone!

We are now into a final concept refinement round, and Anne-Sophie de Baets is doing a splendid job of documenting all our work so far.

We're looking forward to some reflective time at the end of our 6-week sprint, when we'll be figuring out where to go next (including what to implement in Sakai and when) and also taking the time to wrap up our documentation effort and start to prepare user research results for publication.

even museums are networking socially now

Spotted on the BBC News site: UK museums, including the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, are setting up a new joint website which will let users build communities around museum content. It's the National Museums Online Learning project and you can read about it here.

The value of social networking features to people who are both enjoying the collections and learning at the same time is something we hope we may be able to bring out in our project, too.

Phase III of our research gets under way...

Just a quick update for those following our research into the uses of social networking in an academic context.

Having interviewed 8 undergraduates and 8 post-graduate students in Phases I and II of our research, we're now onto Phase III, interviewing a diverse collection of academics associated with the University, from people at the start of their careers to a leading Professor, from someone returning part-time after a career break to people holding both departmental and college posts.

We're eagerly anticipating the analysis phase that will be coming up after this, as we try to synthesise the concerns, goals and motivations across the different groups of University members.

Ambient social networking

Over in the Newnham area of Cambridge, local company CamVine is looking at novel ways of displaying internet content on screens. This is a lot more fun than it might sound - check their daily twitter updates, which will highlight new ways of using Web2 and social, user-generated content in a shared environment. One for every day in February! (Is publishing an idea a day in this way a useful method for getting interest and feedback in your project? Should we try it for Academic Networking? Might it also work for research projects? Would a more private, group-oriented microblog such as Yammer or Wiggio be more appropriate for academics? Let us know!)

In a recent blog post, founder Quentin Stafford-Fraser talks about watching social network status feeds on displays, perhaps dotted around one's home, workplace or university. I can imagine having my research group's feeds in my departmental tearoom, where they could spark conversation and ideas (or give me something to read whilst I wait for the coffee machine to gurgle to a finish).

Quentin calls this ambient social networking...

Do you web2?

Netskills are looking for information on how researchers, academics, and the people who support their work use emerging tools, such as Web2.0 things like twitter, flickr and more. This is part of work funded by the JISC Users and Innovation (U&I) programme.

Please help them out by taking their survey!

They will use information from the survey to create guides to help others see how emerging technologies can help in research and teaching.

Libraries, Twitter and social networking

Twitter - a 'micro-blogging' and social networking service - is making its way into libraries across the US, whether to update patrons with important news (unexpected closures), to provoke curiosity and questions or to communicate internally. This article provides an interesting overview:

http://lis5313.ci.fsu.edu/wiki/index.php/Twittering_Libraries

What's out there? Looking at Academia.edu

The Academic Networking team at CARET, together with our colleague Clay Fenlason of Georgia Tech, have been thinking about Academia.edu, the academic networking site.

It's an thought-provoking model of networking, inviting you to navigate a visualization of two parallel networks, one of research interests and one of academic institutions. Research topics and publishing outputs become the organizing principals.

Here are our thoughts in a little more detail:

Good points

Research is a global endeavour, not an institutional one, and Academia.edu reflects this. One of our interviewees had a profile on Academia.edu. She explained this was because at graduate level, you are unlikely to be working in the same field as people in your department. (This is partly because the graduates and academics are hugely aware of subtle nuances and differences between areas . You need to be aware of and keeping in touch with the research and publications of people who are working in your field - and they are most likely to be at other Universities. The ultimate nightmare for a PhD student is that you devote 3 years to researching 'railway companies in the Russian Revolution' and that 2.5 years through the research, another academic publishes a book on 'railway companies in the Russian Revolution', at which point you have to start again. Thus, Academia.edu offers another opportunity to keep abreast of research in your field internationally, and to make others aware of your research.

The same interviewee said that in looking at other people's key words (how they'd chosen to define their research), she had been prompted to think about her research differently.

It's useful to be able to search people by their research field, particularly now that interdisciplinary research is becoming increasingly important, and it helps you to find connections - i.e. who else is working on Mongolian nomads, whether they're in the Geography dept or the dept of Anthropology. It's a very obvious thing to do, but not something that you can do in our current university website.

Our interviewee said that she particularly appreciated the option to allow people to contact you via the site, without you needing to give out your email address.

I loved the way that when I put in the URL of my research paper, it turned it into Flash paper so that I could read it directly online, rather than by downloading it. It's a small point technically, but it certainly created 'user delight' for me.

I enjoyed being able to see other people's research papers so easily.

I like the news feed, showing what others have been up to, although it's not really targeted enough to be of much use

Downsides

I couldn't actually find anyone with my research interest ('Who else is working on Restoration Comedy at the moment?'). I couldn't find it by searching, wasn't sure how it would be classed (dramatic literature? literary criticism?) and couldn't find it by browsing. Or at least I don't think I could find it by browsing - 41 people were under 'dramatic literature' and I didn't want to look at each of them individually to see if they happened to work on Restoration Comedy. The search facility is clearly vital for this type of tool to be useful.

It isn't regulated in any way, so there's no guarantee that anyone on there is in fact who they say they are, that their papers are genuine, etc. For example, John created the Department of Tube Mechanics at Oxford, and added himself to it. No-one seems to have noticed.

It is extra work for academics to fill in and update their profiles - not only do they have to put together their official Departmental profile, at Cambridge their college profile, and quite possibly a research group profile or a specialist disciplinary network , but now they have to keep an Academia.edu profile.

The Flash interface drives me absolutely mad! From people's individual profiles, I'm constantly being returned to the overview of all Universities when I wanted to return to what I was last looking at, i.e. all members of particular department / centre. It doesn't seem well thought out from this point of view.

It's slow

Pew report on social networking amongst adults

The Arcadia project blog mentions some of the conclusions of a new Pew report on how US adults use social networks. It seems they network mostly for personal reasons, that they are aware of privacy issues, and when networking professionally, use a variety of profiles on a range of sites.

The full blog post is here.

Podcase with UX consultant from Flow Interactive

Those looking for a brief introduction to what user-centred design might be, and how it might benefit businesses, might want to check out this interview with one of the UX consultants at Flow Interactive, the consultancy that's guiding us through the research and design phase of this project.

http://www.jenerous.com/2006/08/28/paul-adams-of-flow-interactive-on-user-experience-design/

Overheard....

I was chatting to a mathematician colleague about our academic networking research in a popular Cambridge cafe yesterday, when a student sharing our table broke into the conversation. "I totally recognise what you're saying," she said, and began to tell us her experience of finding books and the inadequacies of reading lists: "I go to the UL and when I see one of my lecturers in the hallway or the tea room, I ask them to recommend me the three best books on the subject."

It was great not only to have a student spontaneously recognise our interpretations of what our research had brought out, but to be interested and excited that this research is taking place!

Looking at other social networking sites

One thing that the team's been keen on all along is that our social networking tool shouldn't aim to replace face-to-face interaction at the University. We want to promote 'idea moments', what a team from another University called 'Rolos'*, and we think that getting people physically together is a great way for these moments to happen. As far as we're concerned, if our tool introduces people to each other who go on to meet up occasionally, it's done its job - they don't have to regularly communicate via the tool as well.

So I was excited to hear about www.meetup.com - a site which helps facilitate face to face communication using the web. The whole point is that you meet real people, living near you, to talk about shared interests. Yes, there are message boards and photo albums for those groups, but the emphasis throughout is on meeting face to face. I think it's a brave concept. I'll have to report back on the quality of discussion at a meeting, though!

* Random Opportunities for Learning Outcomes, apparently! Would you give someone your last ROLO?

Reflecting on our research questions

The quiet time between Christmas and New Year has been a great chance for me to reflect on the key questions at the heart of this research project (it's been wonderful having such a peaceful office!). I've been taking a step back and considering what we really what to know in order to make a difference to our University members. After all, we are the Centre for Applied Research, and making sure that our research leads to valuable change is what it's all about. The data gathering phase of our research has always been seen in three stages, and with one stage under our belts and moving into detailed planning for the next stages, it's a good time to reflect on how the data and preliminary analysis from stage 1 (looking at undergraduates) should influence the research questions for stages 2 (looking at graduate students) and 3 (looking at academics). Returning to and rethinking research questions seems to me a delicate balance - the University landscape has moved on in the last 3 months, with other related projects being launched or piloted, and so it's well worth us asking again what we want to achieve. At the same time, our original research question, 'How can the social networks of students and academics help them in their learning, teaching and research?' remains valid, and it's important to keep a steady eye on that goal. Ultimately, however, we need to break that high-level question down into a more detailed research questions for each stage of the data gathering phase, and it seems reasonable to be willing to reconsider these detailed research questions over the course of the project.

Data gathering and data analysis

Wow! It's been a busy time for the Social Networking team, with the first phase of data gathering and analysis now complete. Tjhien, Anne-Sophie and I began by researching undergraduates, looking at the role that other people around them can play in their learning, and in particular identifying the points at which they feel other people could potentially help them, but for some reason currently are unable to. After a diary study and interviews with 8 students carefully chosen to reflect the spread of people at the University, we feel we have a much deeper understanding of their needs. There have of course been some surprises, and so points at which this research appears to be conflicting with previous research projects carried out here in CARET. In particular, we're feeling intrigued by students' use of Facebook: a previous project had concluded that self-representation and self-fashioning played a huge role of students' Facebook use, whereas this current research suggests that Facebook is seen by our students largely as an events management and communication system.

Meanwhile, we seem to have used up almost every post-it note in the office during the analysis phase - with the expert help of consultancy Flow Interactive, we seem to have developed a very post-it note intensive process!

Over the next couple of months, we'll be moving into phases II and III of our research , working with post-grads and senior academics. Once again, we'll be looking at the role that the people around them play in their learning, and the role that they feel they can and should play in helping others learn.

from the CARET library

A brief introduction to our project from Harriet Truscott.

Flowing along...

This week, the academic networking team is really busy, as we are conducting our first round of user research with help from Flow Interactive, specialist consultants in user research and user-centric design. Although CARET has a lot of expertise in these areas, it's great to see how industrial product design in this area is delivered following best practice, and Flow are both helping us out with this project, and training us at the same time.

We are really enjoying hosting Flow (and all our lovely student volunteers!) at CARET, and look forward to analysing the results of our work next week.

Welcome!

Welcome to our project about social networking in higher education.

Dr. Laura James will be managing this project at CARET, with a great team of Harriet Truscott, Anne-Sophie de Baets, Nicolaas Matthijs, Tjhien Liao, and others working on user-centric design and development.