Twitter Feed Analysis and Report
A number of think tanks in Washington, DC and around the country produce and publish papers on different aspects of schooling and education policy. These think tanks often announce and link their papers through Twitter. Twice this semester you will be responsible for:
- following one week’s education policy activity on Twitter,
- briefing the class on what you’ve found,
- providing a written report of your findings on this website,
- and selecting a think tank paper for the class to read.
Using Twitter
In the right sidebar of this website, you’ll see a Twitter feed from the Education Policy list I created as well as from the hashtags #edpolicy and #edreform. You can use the sidebar feed, or you can follow my list and create and track your own searches for #edpolicy and #edreform on Twitter.com, through a firefox plugin like yoono, or through different desktop and mobile apps like hootsuite, tweetdeck, or seesmic. You can find tutorials and general support for Twitter on its help page.
The Class Brief and the Written Report
During the first week of class, you will sign up for two different weeks in which you will provide a class brief and written report of your Twitter feed analysis. The schedule for these briefs/reports will be posted on the course schedule.
The written report and the class brief should provide an overview of the week’s education policy activity on Twitter. The week you analyze will precede the class meeting in which you present. For example, if you are scheduled to present on 14 February, you will analyze the Twitter feed from 7 February to 14 February, understanding that the feed for the last day—the day you present—will be minimal. In your written report and class briefing, you should address:
- patterns in topic, ideological position, and other phenomena,
- differences from the previous week’s patterns,
- anomalies that stand out among the patterns,
- a one to two sentence description (with a link) of one policy paper that you would like the class to read for the following week,
- and your overall evaluation of the week’s feed.
The written report will be due in draft form on this website by class time on the day you present. Presentations will be no longer than 10 minutes, and will be very informal. You may include visualizations that help illuminate and describe the patterns you are finding. Sites like Many Eyes and Google have a number of visualization tools.
After your presentation, the class will decide which of the two policy papers presented (yours and the other person’s) it will read for the following week.
