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| Twitter Users Tweeting about #FLwebsci EDIT: For a larger version of this image, please see http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjp106/MOOC-Tweeters |
With the University of Southampton’s first MOOC on Web
Science now coming up to its second week, work has been under way to promote
and discuss the new course, and – in parallel with the MOOC’s focus on the Web
– a lot of this has happened on social media. I recently ran a session with
Digital Marketing MSc students at the University, who were asked to post
messages promoting the MOOC to their own social networks. In a follow-up
session, I presented some analysis on the use of the #FLwebsci hashtag on
Twitter, to demonstrate the powerful effects of marketing through the social
web.
Using a Tweet Harvester run by the University, I collected
all tweets containing ‘FLwebsci’ since the FutureLearn platform and the Web
Science MOOC were announced. By exporting this data into graphml format, I was
able to then load a data file of user interactions into the free, open source
program Gephi to begin analysis and visualisation. This is an extended,
modified version of a post on the same topic on the MOOC blog, to cover more
details about how to create a visualisation such as this if you are interested.
