Activity 2.5 - Visualisation

The task gave us a choice of visualisation tools to try out. The aim was to produce visuals of our Twitter (or other online) activity and then ask the following questions:

• Did the visualisation reveal anything surprising?
• Could you think of ways you might use a visualisation like this in your presentation?
• What else would it need to do to add benefit?
• Did you have any concerns about what could be found about the networks of others using these tools?

The tool I chose is called Twitonomy. Go on, try it out - it's really quite interesting!

Here are a few of the visuals I produced, with my thoughts on them.

Interesting User Information

This is the one I found most interesting because it shows who I've engaged with the most. Thankfully, DatBrit7 is one of my sons and he comes out as my top priority. My other son isn't as active on Twitter. Then there's a whole bunch of professional contacts, some of whom go back quite a long way. There's Dughall, who I worked with many years ago when VLEs first came out and we were trying to get one embedded across all the primary schools in the local authority. Then there are the MinecraftEdu people and educators who are connected with that. Some of the people in the list, I've never really met but they are contacts from the BETT show. It will be interesting to see how these change over the next 6 months as I focus more on professional networks.

Slightly Embarrassing Hashtags Information

Okay, I admit it - having Eurovision as my top hashtag is just embarrassing. I can't help it and there's no excuse. It's a family tradition and we thought it would fade out when Terry Wogan retired but Graham Norton is just as sarcastic and we're addicted. I'm over the moon though, that MinecraftEdu is a close second!

Pretty graphs showing when I'm on Twitter

I can't see any earthly use for this but it is still kind of interesting. I have no recollection of ever being up at 4am, so I can only assume it doesn't self-adjust for different time zones. Clearly Saturday evenings got a boost because of Eurovision, which leads me to my overall conclusion. For small-scale users, statistics like these can easily be skewed by a one-off event that attracts a high number of tweets, especially if they are hashtagged.