Make 2.0 real and relevant: the potential of social reporting as a catalyst to nurture adoption of social software in a research organisation

Make 2.0 real and relevant: the potential of

social reporting as a catalyst to nurture adoption of social software

in a research organisation

Elmi Bester, CSIR

4th African Conference for Digital Scholarship and CurationCSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa

17 May 2011

www.nedicc.ac.za

#digischol I suppose you could say

I’m a SOCIO-cogno-techno geek

Agenda

• Context

• Overview of social reporting

• Perspective shift

• Social reporting in a new light

• Implications

• Challenges

• Conclusions

Context (1)

• CSIR Knowledge Commons – Nurture a culture of knowledge sharing and increase

contactivity

– Physical space AND VIRTUAL SPACE

Context (2) – Establishing the Virtual Knowledge Commons

Phase 1: Infrastructure & capabilities• Identification and sourcing/setup of the relevant tools• Build an adequate level of understanding and fluency• Social reporting as practice framework selected

Phase 2: Adoption & entrenchment (mainstreaming)• Facilitate adoption as part of knowledge sharing and contactivity

initiatives with a view on the entrenchment of these in the culture and flow of the organisation

• Measure progress/activity

Phase 3: Value realisation & impact understanding• Assess and measure the value and impact, as well as the

perceptions of value and impact

Context (3)

• Adopted stance as technology steward

– enabling people to discover and appropriate useful technology

– enable people to find and create content

– express their identity and usefully participate in communities and networks through these technologies

(From: Digital Habitats: Wenger, White & Smith 2009)

Overview of social reporting

“Social reporting is a set of skills and tools mixing journalism, facilitation and social media to report

collectively and live from an event, capture the moments of the event and develop interactive conversations.”

http://ictkm.cgiar.org/tutorials/organise-social-reporting-from-events/

• Add a rich multi-modal layer of participation during an event• (Informal) narrative of event – include more voices and diversity• Can bring in non-attendees into conversation; reach out• Place ownership of tools in the hands of community and networks

members. They are allowed to use them in ways that make sense for them and for their purposes.

• Typical footprints of social reporting include blog posts, video clips, photos, wikis and microsharing (a familiar list)

References available on http://thinkingknowledge.wikispaces.com

Social reporting: Curation (1)

Social reporting: Curation (2)

Social reporting: Curation (3)

Web 2.0 @ ShareFair Cali (May 2010)

• Web 2.0 tools give us the opportunity to allow everyone to be informed and participate. Here follow some of the channels that you can use to follow the Feria and engage in:

– Blog, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook Fan page, Twitter

• 200 hundred participants from 18 countries

• 429 Visits for a total of 861 pageviews, by 289 unique visitors, from 27 countries/territories, reads the blog traffic report for period May 23-30

• TweetReach, the system to see how far your tweets travel reported tag #sharefaircali: Reached 31,311 people via 566 tweets, for a total of 280,388 impressions contributed by 57 twitterers

Share Fair in Addis (October 2010)

http://youtu.be/fv5oOxAki38

#digischol 16 May 2011

Extended conversations

Shift in our perspectives

Using social media tools

Digital literacies

If we build it, will they come

Training ……………………….

Adopt social reporting as practice

Adopting practices ………..

Transliteracy

If we build it, will they participate

Social learning, learning about, practicing to do

Lower cost of ‘2.0’ adoption in other contexts as well

New windows of opportunity

&

&&

&

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Practising practices

Practise• perform (an activity) or

exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to acquire, improve or maintain proficiency in it

• carry out or perform (a particular activity, method, or

custom) habitually or regularly

Practice• the actual application or

use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it

• the customary, habitual, or

expected procedure or way of doing of something

http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0654700#m_en_gb0654700http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0654670#dws-m_en_gb-m-en_gb-msdict-00002%E2%80%93050935

Social reporting: Documented practice; Regular opportunities; Real experience with meaningful outputs and results. Opportunity to practise different roles and practies at different events.

Social reporting: Documented practice; Regular opportunities; Real experience with meaningful outputs and results. Opportunity to practise different roles and practies at different events.

Social Reporting as an umbrella practice

Transliteracy

• Various terms – digital literacies, 21st century literacies, new media literacies (imply many literacies)

• Unifying perspective– It is not about learning text literacy and visual literacy and digital

literacy and social media literacy in isolation from each other, but about the interaction among these skills and the fluent switching between multiple modalities

• “the ability to read, write and interact across multiple platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and films, to digital social networks” (Thomas et al 2007)

Social reporting: Multi-modal; integrate offline & onlineSocial reporting: Multi-modal; integrate offline & online

Participatory culture

• Interactivity as an affordance of technology participation as an affordance of culture– Being literate = what it is like to contribute own expertise to a

process that involves many intelligences• Define participatory culture as one:

– With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and engagement– With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others– With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most

experienced is passed along to novices– Where members believe that their contributions matter

– Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another

From: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture , Jenkins et al.

Social reporting: Many-to-many; incentive can be facilitated by active visibility, encouragement and recognition before, during and after the event; leverage the energy of event. Opportunity to find ‘natural fit’ – many roles involved.

Social reporting: Many-to-many; incentive can be facilitated by active visibility, encouragement and recognition before, during and after the event; leverage the energy of event. Opportunity to find ‘natural fit’ – many roles involved.

Social learning, learning about & practicing to do

Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of NoticingJohn Mason , 2002

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Social reporting: Shared experience affords shared reflection; focused exposure to possibilities and dynamics.

Social reporting: Shared experience affords shared reflection; focused exposure to possibilities and dynamics.

Lower barriers to adoption

• Skills and setup (perceived)• Lack of clarity what the benefits might

be (reported)• Limited normative acceptance • I just don’t have time to learn all of this

by myself

Why + How + What

Social reporting: Training and coaching available; make benefits from individual and institutional perspective visible; implicit normative sanctioning; provides re-usable guidelines, templates and toolkits.

Social reporting: Training and coaching available; make benefits from individual and institutional perspective visible; implicit normative sanctioning; provides re-usable guidelines, templates and toolkits.

Practical implications

• To plan event & social reporting as one experience • Be deliberate in creating opportunity for participatory culture

and transliteracy• Nurture conditions for Social Learning - before, during and

after event• Replicable infrastructure, guidelines and templates• Should be able to adopt the tools introduced with minimum

investment (to learn and to buy)• Many opportunities for social reporting

– Events, courses, field visits

– A group could also opt to do a “social reporting week”

Challenges

• Organisational readiness– ICT infrastructure – Social media policies & governance– Culture of experimentation– Capacity (coaches; coordinators; stewards)– Volunteerism

• Organisational platforms do not have the same usability (& analytics) as open platforms

• Can distract focus from the event • Not yet sure how strong it will be in addressing or negotiating

key institutional barriers & long-standing normative expectations of scholarly and research conduct

Conclusion

Deeper change than just e-ink

• Richer and multidimensional conceptual framework

• Coherent, participatory and continuous learning experience

• Develop individual and organisational capacity

Any questions?

Elmi [email protected]

elmibester

Elmi Bester

thinkingknowledge.wordpress.com

thinkingknowledge.wikispaces.com

S25 44.717 E028 16.684