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Mistaken Goal: Where Higher Education & Technology Meet


"...technology is not something that happens to us. It is something we create. We must not confuse a tool with a goal. We must, therefore, be sure that technology serves the fundamental purposes of higher education." Stanley N. Katz in "In Information Technology, Don't Mistake a Tool for a Goal"

More #sachat analysis: One Illuminating Figure

Posted on September 12th 2011 in Research,Twitter

Laura Pasquini and I are working on analyzing #sachat data, a follow-up to work I’ve done previously but did not formally publish. Part of our work involves looking at a few other student affairs-related hashtags to help us understand #sachat in context. This figure shows the number of Twitter messages posted with particular hashtags – #highered, #sachat, #sadoc, #sagrad, #sajobs, and #studentaffairs – during the week of June 27, 2011. The #sachat session really stands out here both in the number of messages posted and in how it interrupts an otherwise regular daily and weekly pattern. This isn’t a profound discovery but it’s an easy way of illustrating that #sachat sessions are relatively unique and prominent uses of Twitter among some users.

* Comments(6)

  • http://ericstoller.com/blog/ Eric Stoller

    Love the visual. How are you tracking these hashtags?

  • http://mistakengoal.com Kevin R. Guidry

    We used the desktop version of The Archivist. It’s clunky and imperfect in many ways but it seemed to do what we needed it to do for this study.

  • http://ericstoller.com/blog/ Eric Stoller

    Twitter really messed things up when they changed their TOS. I really miss What The Hashtag. Such an incredible resource for the community…

  • http://mistakengoal.com Kevin R. Guidry

    Yes, it makes life more complicated and the data much harder to get for most of us without significant technical skills and resources. On the other hand, it does help keep some of the riff raff out of this research space so it’s not *totally* bad… :)

  • http://brianfleduc.com Brian LeDuc

    Hey Kevin,

    Thanks for bringing more structure and focus to the research around this topic, and even further for sharing it! Is there any consistency among these hashtags regarding frequency as it relates to the time of year? I’m interested in future research and the direction this is going!

    brian

  • http://mistakengoal.com Kevin R. Guidry

    Good question! Unfortunately, I don’t have the data to provide an answer. We only collected data for a few months and I stopped collecting data a couple of months ago when I moved to a new apartment. Collecting Twitter data has become much more difficult in the last 8 months or so since Twitter changed their terms of service. It would be easier for me to do this if my host supported a more up-to-date version of php but they don’t (and I may eventually have to switch hosts if this continues to be an issue – hint hint @asmallorange !).

    We could look at #sachat chats since we have transcripts for nearly all of them but I don’t think that would answer your question. The data with which Laura and I are working have #sachat sessions from March through June. Participation in the sessions varies and is lower in June but I don’t know how much to attribute that to timing and how much to attribute to topic selection and interest.

    One thing that I don’t know if Laura and I will have space to address is the turbulent history of the evening #sachat chats. Those never really seemed to take off like the day chats and I don’t know why. Is the community too small to support two high-participation events in the same day or week? Or is the different structure of the evening chats – less or no moderator control – the primary difference? I suspect both explanations have some truth.