If you would like to read the complete thesis on the role that Twitter plays in the formation and maintenance of Personal Learning Networks, I have a link to the final thesis on my blog.

I’ve been rewriting pieces from my proposal that are still applicable to the final thesis. I reread my methodology section this week and was pleasantly surprised to find myself feeling very happy with what I had written, and my justification for choosing a phenomenological approach for this research. My feeling with most Twitter research being done  right now is primarily quantitative focusing on network analysis of the relationship or content analysis of tweets, or mixed methods where surveys are the primary research instrument. Not a lot of this type of in-depth long form interview stuff which, I hope, will be useful and add a deeper, richer layer to enhance what is currently being done.

I’ve added a section in my lit review that references Stephen Downes and his work on learning networks, specifically referencing the idea that autonomy is a key piece of a learning network. This autonomy is manifested by the participants through decisions around who they will follow, and what information they choose to pay attention to. membership is fluid, and 2 of the participants speak directly about pruning and grooming their Twitter followers on a regular basis – fine tuning to ensure that their network is achieving what it is they want it to achieve.

The first draft of the thesis was supposed to be into my supervisor yesterday, but I am not ready yet to submit anything for review. I still need to do quite a bit of writing. I believe I have my major themes established and am revisiting the interviews looking for quotes from the participants that provide the support for the themes.

I am thinking that, at some point, I will want to move this blog over to my own self hosted blog to have a record there.

I currently have 4 days off work and have thrown myself headlong into finishing this first draft for Monday and sending it off to my supervisor for his feedback.

Twitter enables creation of weak ties that can turn into strong ties at a moment’s notice.

Participants don’t worry about maintaining tight relationships (the Dunbar number), rather are more interested in creating a weak tie to a possible resource. Twitter enables creation of weak ties that can turn into strong ties at a moment’s notice. Conversations are network signals that participants in the network are open to the possibility of moving from a weak tie state to a strong tie state on Twitter since conversations are often indicators of strong ties – you have a conversation with someone, that is a signal that you have a stronger tie than a weak tie. This is why most participants seem to place such a high value on seeing conversations – with any other participant – when looking to follow new people. It is one of the signals they are looking for when examining someone’s Twitter stream – if you are looking to have a conversation with another participant in the network, then you may be open to having a conversation with me at some point in the future. The connection is more about the possibility – setting up the environment – for future collaborations.

Participants don’t worry about keeping up with the general flow of information in the network because they are more interested in the connections and being able to turn those connections from weak state to strong state. This is where reciprocity comes into play – the reciprocal agreement entered into when using Twitter as a tool for PLN’s is that you as a participant are willing to move from a weak tie state to a strong tie state with other members of your PLN.

Half baked. But out there.

This third interview I am coding is very interesting in that the participant is almost a hostile witness, not in his attitude about the research – he was an excellent research participant who has given me some wonderful stuff. But rather with his use of Twitter and the PLN. He is a contrarian and seems to relish the role of being someone who stirs the pot a bit. Not in a malicious or mischievous way, but rather critically. He is someone who is critical of technology and the blond acceptance of technology, and is not shy about making that view known. It’s interesting because I am rethinking the nature of PLN’s based on some of his answers. or rather, I am rethinking whether what he has is a PLN – is he connecting with people to learn from them, which is one of the premises of a PLN, or is he connecting with people to teach them? What is his motivation to connect with these people in his PLN when he seems to spend a great deal of time disagreeing with what they say. Is that entering into a reciprocal relationship, as relationships in PLN are?

One final note about this participant. I have noticed that every participant so far has spoken about a More Knowledgeable Other who has introduced Twitter to them, except for this person. He tried Twitter, entered the trough of disillusionment 6 months in (as most participants have noted), but what brought him back wasn’t a person, but a technology – he got a new iPhone on it that had a Twitter app. Which begs the question – can technology be the MKO? Does the Other in Vygotsky’s MKO have to be a person, or can it be a technology – a computer – who is more knowledgeable than the user of the computer? Did the Twitter app that came with his iPhone have any instructions on how to use Twitter? Did his phone “teach” him about the true affordances of Twitter?

I am anticipating a fairly length thesis (120 pages?) because of the nature of IPA analysis. Being hermeneutic (double hermeneutic to be exact), the analysis will require many quotes from the primary data sources to support the analysis. I suspect the quotes will make for a lengthy piece of writing.

My supervisor has recommended I find a good editor who is strong with APA formatting, so I’ll begin to hunt down someone. we are also beginning the process of finding an external reader to review the research as part of the validity. I have also committed to myself that the final paper will be publicly posted on my blog, a thought that both terrifies and excites me. I want to make it open to comments and hope that my peers will take the opportunity to review, critique, support and generally crank away at what I have done.

We also discussed the lit review and the need to revisit and expand that, based on the inforamtion the research is uncovering. I have decided to do a moratorium on reading any new Twitter research that comes my way – there is just too much to keep up right now and I have more than enough for my lit review. If a major study comes out in the next few months, I’ll probably miss it unless it hits me over the head. My supervisor thinks this is wise – at some point the lit review just has to stop.

I also spoke about some of the theoretical footing that I want to ground the research in, again hitting on some things that I want to add that are relevant to the research. So that will need to be added to the lit review.

I am close to completing the analysis of my second interview and hope to have that done by the end of this weekend.

I am currently coding and adding memos to the interviews, picking out whatever strikes me as interesting at this point. My supervisor has emphasized that at this stage, that is good. I was worried that I was over coding, but I need to do a fairly detailed first level analysis, and, after reviewing a bit of my coding and memos, my supervisor thinks that I am on the right track. Later on I’ll begin going through all the codes and memos and begin reducing and eliminating, combining and looking for super-ordiante themes. At this point, I’ll be eliminating the content that does not answer the research question – it all has to come back to that question: what role does Twitter play in the development and maintenance of Personal Learning networks among educators? I have a lot of information that does not (at least obviously) relate to that question, so much of what I am coding will probably end up not being used in the final paper. But I have been surprised at how things that I thought were irrelevant early on are suddenly becoming relevant and useful to answer that question.

The reason I bring this up is that it sometimes feels like among educators who engage in PLN activity and use Twitter, there seems to be a belief among some that Twitter IS the PLN. It is a point of view that was articualted by at least 2 other participants in the study – that they are somewhat frustrated with the thought that, for many educators who use Twitter, Twitter and PLN are synonymous. That for them, Twitter IS the PLN.

This confusion seems logical to me, considering that Twitter appears to be where new educators using Twitter first come in contact with the term. Let’s say you are an educators and you start using Twitter – hear about it from a friend and get into using it. Then you start connecting with other educators, and notice these educators on Twitter are using this strange unknown acronym – PLN – in their tweets. It’s the first time you have seen this, so you begin to investigate what this term means and discover that it means connecting with others for the purpose of learning – exactly what you signed up on Twitter to do. So it would only make sense that you would equate Twitter with the PLN. Perhaps this could explain why some who begin to use Twitter immediately identify with it as their PLN – it’s where they discover the term.

What I have done over the past 6 weeks or so is choose an analysis tool (CAQDAS), based on a recommendation from my thesis supervisor. After testing a few (including MaxQDA and nVivio), I’ve chosen Atlas.ti. It felt like the most comfortable, although I would hardly call any of the packages intuitive, but I chalk that up just as much to my status as a beginning researcher as anything else.  Cost was also a factor. Since I am not planning on doing a ton of research after my Masters, I didn’t want to commit a lot of money to a QDA package. Nor did i want a steep learning curve, so I needed to find something that made the most sense to me without spending a lot of time doing software analysis.

I have spent time over the past few weeks getting comfortable with the interface, and now have my project set up and am beginning to do the actual coding and memoing of the transcripts.

I have also reread the passage on analysis in my IPA reference book, and brushing up on how analysis works in an IPA study. The analysis is ideographic, meaning it focuses strongly on the experiences of a single user in a particular context which involves an iterative hermeneutic analysis in which the texts are read and reread. the first phase of analysis is almost a free textual analysis in which I am going through the text and making lots of notes (in the form of memos and codes).  There are no predetermined codes that I am using, but rather I am letting the codes emerge from the data, which means that I am often going back and recoding as I notice codes emerging. My memoing are thoughts and observations, as well as questions I pose to myself to follow-up on as I try to make sense of what is happening for the participant through their own words.

I am trying to pay close attention to the language that they used during the interview. For example, today I came across this from one of my participants (I’ve added emphasis):

there have been times where I have been in class or I have been working with colleagues and they need resources for uh teaching German or something and so I basically put out a a little flyer to my pln and say ‘hey I need does anybody have any resources on teaching German to high school students’ and again within like 3 or 4 minutes you know I have responses and I have resources

As I read this, the first thing that popped into my head was that this was an example of crowdsourcing and leveraging their PLN for resources. But then I began to focus on the word “they” in that passage and began to wonder what that meant. The participant didn’t say “I need resources”, they said “they need resources”. So I began to wonder what they meant by “they”. Does this participant see themselves as a connector between a larger network and a local network of colleagues? Do they see their PLN as a resource not only for himself, but also for the people they work with locally in this case, in their school? Do they perceive of themselves as an agent that can act on behalf of others, and is this a role that they want or like to have?  Is this one of the motivators that they have to create a PLN? To be seen as a knowledge leader who can quickly access resources needed by others in their network? The word “they” has triggered a number of questions for me in the analysis, and reflects the level of analysis at this stage of the game.

This type of analysis takes time. I have spent about 3 hours on the first transcript and have so far only made it through 20 minutes of a 70 minute interview – and I have 7 of these to analyze. June is going to come very quickly.

It has taken 4-6 hours to transcribe each interview. The process is fairly manual. I am using the open source VLC media player and Word, doing it by hand. I play the interviews back at 1/3 speed and find I can get into a good groove. All the interviews are transcribed in all caps. Once I am finished I go back, convert the document (which is usually between 10 and 12,000 words) to mixed case, and then go through and manually spellcheck. Spell-checking and converting cases takes about 20 minutes per document.

It’s manual and time-consuming, but worth it, I think, to revisit the interviews once again and get a feel for them as a whole without having to worry about  conducting the actual interview. And I suspect the next few weeks, once these are transcribed, will be deconstructing and reducing the whole into pieces as I begin to tease out strands for the analysis.

The challenge with the analysis will be to not only find the common themes, but also respect the unique individuals – the ideographic, and ensure that those unique moments are captured in the analysis. It is much more than just finding themes, but also using my own experiences in the analysis to fish out things that are unique and interesting. There has been a lot of anecdotal work done on this topic (blogs, etc), and the challenge will be to find something fresh that will add to the conversation. I can certainly see themes and patterns already in the four interviews I have done, while at the same time getting a sense of some of the unique perspectives of the participants involved.

Tomorrow I chat with my supervisor – the first time we have spoken since prior to starting my data gathering. I am anxious to talk to him and get his perspective on the project so far.

Moving the PLN questions off the top helped as it felt easier to weave that back into the conversation at a later point when speaking of Twitter. It also helped frame more definitively how this person thought of the people they follow on Twitter, and whether they considered them part of their PLN.

One thing I did for this interview that i wish I would have done for the previous is jot down key phrases that the participant says and then use those as prompts for them to move deeper, or add further explanation or elaboration. While i did take notes for all the interviews, and often used these for follow-up questions, for this interview I would write down quotes of things the participant said as I was interviewing them, and then repeated it back to them asking for more information. This worked very well at getting deeper into some of my questions. While I did do some of this for the other interviews, I found this technique of taking notes not of my feelings of what they were saying, but what they were actually saying made it easier to ask good follow-up questions.

I feel done. I have completed 7 interviews, and have begun jotting paper notes of themes that I feel are emerging, and ideas I have for the analysis. I can sense that I have, in all this content, what I need to move forward.

I also wondered whether I am digging deep enough into the content piece of the Twitter question.  Almost all respondents have talked about sharing of resources as a primary piece of using Twitter – it’s almost spoken of as a given – but I have not gotten into depth about these resources and the exact nature of what is shared. I am not sure that digging deeper into what types of content they share will yield anything further that I want to follow up with, but in my next interview I will spend a bit more time talking to the participant about content in more detail.

Which poses a challenge as I interview people for this research. If any of them Google me (as I am sure they have, being the wired in people that they are), they will see this. They will see that I am one of them. I participate. I contribute. I converse. I am on Twitter. Which I think might make these interviews a bit more difficult. If they do Google me and do a bit of research on me in the time between when I contact them and they agree & we do the interview, they will see that I am active on Twitter, perhaps with some of the same people they are. I run with their crowd. So, do they come into the interview with an expectation that I am like them in the respect that I use Twitter and appear to have a PLN? When they answer a question I pose to them, are they speaking to me as a peer with their responses molded to what they may perceive to me my level of knowledge with the practice they are undertaking?

As phenomenological research, I am the naive participant. I come to the subject with fresh eyes. I am doing my best to bracket my personal opinions during the interviews and keep as neutral as possible. But I sometimes get the feeling that the answers I get are hedged in this opinion some of the participants may have about me and my prior level of knowledge. They are speaking to the networked learner Clint and not the researcher Clint.

Participant 5 shared some great stories with me and then went so far as to post on Twitter to their network and ask them to chime in with their opinion as to what they thought made Twitter different than other tools for connecting with their PLN. During the interview, there were a few moments of “you know”, which, when I hear in an interview I seem to be interpreting as both a mental pause for the participant and, more importantly, a trigger for me that says they believe they are speaking to someone who knows.

I wonder if this causes some dissonance with the participants when I interview them and present myself as the neutral observer, naively questioning things that, to them, must seem like obvious things I should know or understand.

I find it difficult not to share with them. To, in the words of my supervisor, co-create knowledge with them during this process. Sometimes they ask me questions, which I answer as honestly as I can in order to keep them comfortable, but the whole time I answer a question I wonder if I am influencing their answers? How could I not be, really. In this interview, for example, the participant shared a wonderful story with me about the value of being open and public on the web in these networked spaces. Which led into a brief conversation between me and the participant about a shared person we knew and a project they had undertaken. I won’t know until after I go back and fully transcribe the interview, but I sensed that maybe something changed after that moment with the participant. As if the stories suddenly came a bit easier and less tentative than before. Perhaps this was because of the way I responded to that story that there was a moment in the participants head when she went  ”okay, that is what he wants” based on my reaction to her story. But it could also be that we had suddenly found a shared connection, someone we both knew that made her more comfortable to answer the questions.

This interview was interesting. Like the previous interview, there was a level of critical thinking by this educator about technology integration in education in general, and his use of Twitter was markedly different from others in the study. His perspective was closer to my previous interview than it was to the first two interviews I have done in that there was a real desire to use Twitter to engage and dialog with colleagues and peers. Not that this desire wasn’t present with my first two participants, but the last two people I have spoken with use the platform much more for dialogue and interaction than resource sharing. Last night’s participant also shared with me an example of a collaborative project where he received support from his Twitter network, in much the same way that my first interview did. The connections made with colleagues

There is also an interesting thread emerging, I believe, about the scope of a Personal Learning Network and Twitter, especially among my last two participants who both spoke about Twitter and those on Twitter being just a part of their PLN, and that their PLN extends far beyond the people they follow and their followers on Twitter. The interview last night was especially emphatic that his PLN included his colleagues at work and people he connects with face to face and never on Twitter. And then he said something interesting – that his PLN includes resources and, by extension, the people who created those resources. The boundaries for this person on where their PLN ends are broad and fuzzy.

Another theme I see emerging is that the Personal Learning Network could more rightly be called a Professional Learning Network, which is slightly different from how I envision it. I see a PLN as something that could potentially be broader than professional colleagues, although that set of people would be quite important. But in my view, a PLN as a personal learning construct could potentially be larger than professional contacts. It could encompass many facets of your life and include many different types of people. However for all four of the people I have talked to about both the members of their PLN and who they follow on Twitter as being primarily other educators, making it more of a professional learning network rather than what I might define as a personal learning network.

One final note about last night’s interview was a great discussion on the potential echo chamber effect of networks in general when it comes with choosing who to follow and who you communicate with. It’s a piece that I want to go back and listen to again soon.

Onto my next few days…it never rains, it pours. Somehow I was in a desert prior to Christmas with potential interviews, and now I somehow have 4 confirmed and another 3 possible in the next week. With the 4 confirmed, that would bring my total to 8, and if the other three pan out, 11 in total. That would be a fantastic data set for this research. However, even if the 3 in the fire don’t pan out (and I suspect 2 of the 3 will), I still will have 8 in the can by the end of next week. While it is too early to say, I think that 8 will give me a decent data set to work with.

167, 231, 432, 467, 611, 901, 966, 1015, 1054, 1114, 1172, 1194, 1208, 1337, 1415, 1513, 1521, 1537, 1569, 1601, 1725, 1836, 1838, 1840, 1897, 1912, 2376, 2485, 2712, 2802

We are a few days before Christmas, so I don’t have a lot of expectations that this round will generate another interview, but I am beginning to feel crunched for time if I want to have the maximum amount of time to fully analyze the data.

Update: January 3, 2010

From this list I have 5 candidates. i sent them invitations today and have followed up with 2 other possible candidates from before Christmas.

Additionally, I have sent follow up requests to those who have not responded to my last round of emails. One of those email addresses got bounced back to me. This person is someone who I have connected with before on Twitter – I follow them and they follow me. So instead of passing on the possibility of having this person in my study, I have sent them a message on Twitter asking them if they could provide me an alternative email address that I could use to send them an invitation.

In the meantime, I have begun transcribing the first interview I have done. I hope to have the three interviews I have completed so far completely transcribed by the end of the holiday break.

On another note, one of the people I have interviewed recently mentioned the interview in a blog post they wrote. It does contain information that I think might be useful in the research, so I am going to ask my supervisor about wether or not I could use it in my research as it may add something to the analysis.

There were a few moments where he answered my questions with a question back at me and I found it difficult to maintain my naive phenomenological bracketed participant role, and felt the need to share with him on a different level than I had with the other participants. He was clearly engaged with many of the same people I am in the edtech social media space, and I think that altered the dynamic of the interview, both good and bad. I felt I needed to be honest with him about my perspective in order for him to get to the level of depth that I was looking for, yet maintain some distance. I don’t want to say it was an uncomfortable dance because that sounds more pejorative than the conversation was. But it was awkward, and I felt like i couldn’t really think on my feet well enough. I had too many conflicting thoughts in my head – be straight with him, tell him just a little, tell him nothing. In the end, I fear I may have erred on the side of sharing too much of my own perspective on the research question with him, but by doing that was able to get him to open up and perhaps engage with me at a different level – a fairly deep level that I don’t think a fully naive researcher could have done.

I am very grateful for this interview. It has lightened my fear from the last post that what I am getting at is nothing more than a well articulated blog post. It really hit upon some interesting points with regards to the role that Twitter plays in Personal Learning Networks. I think I want this to be the first interview I transcribe as it contains, perhaps, some of the richest material so far.

But that dance of presenting myself as a naive participant and leveraging my own experiences was very difficult during this interview. But I am grateful to have danced it.

After this interview, I felt a sudden pressure to “get it right’. By that I mean I am aware of the responsibility I have to accurately represent my participants, their thoughts, experiences and perceptions. I want to do everything I can to ensure that what I end up with is an accurate reflection of what they are telling me.

I also have this fear that what I will end up with has no more insight than a well constructed blog post about Personal Learning Networks. It seems that those who are involved with PLN activities at some point write a blog post about their PLN activities. Some of these that I have read are very well done. In the end, i hope that this research will have something of value to the community.

There is a bit of a rub here in that, as I am doing the interviews, I am aware that my role is to be the naive participant, all experiences and perceptions of the phenomenon are bracketed away. So, I find I am asking somewhat naive questions, and asking for clarifications on concepts and terms I already understand. For example, both participants have gone on at length about hashtags and how those can be triggers for connections and conversations. I am very aware of how hashtags work, yet find myself stepping back and asking some basic questions about this activity. I have found this somewhat frustrating in that I feel it is adding information that needs to be there, but that I am already quite aware of. I won’t know until I dig deeper into the analysis if, by asking clarifying  questions of the mechanics of how certain Twitter functions work, there is anything valuable in those exchanges that will add to my understanding of the research question.

A couple of observations (and I am not sure if this is beginning to border on analysis and whether this is too early in the process to begin to say this, but I think my thoughts at this stage are important, at least in order to explicitly acknowledge them). First, both participants spoke about the importance of key people who assisted them in understanding how Twitter could be used as a tool for professional development (and I use that phrase intentionally as at this point, it seems that the term PLN is somewhat interchangeable with the phrase PLN. That is, the PLN could more likely be called a Professional Learning Network, instead of Personal). Could this “other person” be akin to Vygostky’s More Knowledgable Other (MKO)? I need to do some more exploration on MKO.

Second, the names of Canadians have popped up twice in the conversation. Canucks are well represented and thought of as forward thinking in this area.

The theorists who seem to be coming to the fore as I think about my topic are Bandura, Vygostky, Lave & Wenger. There also needs to be some acknowledgment of Siemen’s connectivism in the paper, as well as networked learning.

Tonight, I am preparing to send out another batch of invitations. I would like to have at least one more interview done before Christmas, and spend the Christmas break transcribing three interviews. Tonight I am going to increase the sample from 20 to 30 in the hopes that I can get a better response.

I have 2878 people left in my population sample. From this list I am pulling 30 random numbers using Research Randomizer. Here are the results (screenshot)

108, 281, 320, 343, 344, 441, 608, 616, 663, 777, 787, 869, 902, 918, 987, 998, 1425, 1440, 1515, 1696, 1865, 1890, 1955, 2032, 2043, 2419, 2438, 2629, 2796, 2821

From this list, I have 4 contactable participants. These have been sent emails.

Towards the end of the conversation, the participant mentioned something called a Critical Friend Group, a new term to me. A quick Google of the term finds that there is something to this term that I need to follow up on as there seems to be some very similar features to a PLN.

Some quick observations and first thoughts from my memory about this specific interview:

• This participant was an advanced user of Twitter, following and subscribing to hashtags, crowdsourcing, and actively participating. Along these lines, I need to speak to my supervisor about adding some more descriptive data to my empirical research that covers some bases with regards to who these people are with respect to their Twitter use. I am thinking of some simple stats like number of followers, following, how long they have used Twitter, and the number of tweets should give a good indication of the levels of Twitter users I am interviewing.
• Twitter came first, PLN followed.
• It seemed that PLN = professional. PLN = learning about teaching and learning practice and connecting with educators. Not much beyond the scope of professional learning and networking.
• I wish I would have dug deeper when I asked how they defined PLN
• I don’t think I uncovered any informal learning, and i am feeling like this is an area where I am weak and am unsure of how to probe to discover this. Informal learning is important in my research, but I am pessimistic that I will unveil any kind of examples of heretofore unknown learning by the participants.
• The video was left on for the interview, at the request of the participant. I wasn’t expecting this, but it did not seem to distract from the conversation.
• I think I did a good job of picking up on points and probing for more information, although I need to keep a better focus on PLN, Twitter and the relationship between the two forefront as I move forward. I felt that this interview got a little too deeply into one or the other, and not necessarily the crossover areas between the two, which is the key focus of the research.

More will come in the transcription and analysis.

Tonight I have sent follow up emails to 4 of the participants I contacted 5 days ago. I am 2 days behind my schedule.

I have my second interview tomorrow morning.

I am also generating another list of 20 from my population, and will be sending out a first query to those. I now have a population of 2898 and am generating another random set of 20 numbers from that population (screenshot).

The next set of numbers is 116, 119, 139, 279, 445, 517, 544, 748, 783, 879, 897, 937, 1199, 1479, 1541, 1606, 1772, 2210, 2441, 2864.

Of these, 5 met the criteria for the study, and have been sent invitations.