OER Visualisation Project: How is OER being socially shared – postscript [day 30] #ukoer

A quick postscript to day 24 of the OER Visualisation project where I looked at how individual Jorum UKOER resources were being, or as was the case, not being shared on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook et al. I did a similar analysis on HumBox records and using my method it was a similar story, almost undetectable social sharing of individual resources.

To try an see if this was because of bad data on my behalf I posed the question to the #ukoer twitter community and the OER-DISCUSS mailing list.  On the OER-DISCUSS list Peter Robinson highlighted that one mention of one of University of Oxford’s resources on StumbleUpon resulted in a 20,000 views spike. On Twitter Catherine Grant (@filmstudiesff) responded:

@mhawksey Re. bookmarking/sharing individual repository resources. Rare, but yes, I do! filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/p/online-film-… & filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com #ukoer

— Catherine Grant (@filmstudiesff) January 20, 2012

Putting Catherine’s first link into sharedcount.com gives the following –> 

So one page of curated resources with almost 50 Facebook reactions, over 80 tweets can have as many social shares an entire repository.

This issue is a well known one within the OER community and with almost eerie timing the following day after the ‘day 24’ post Pat Lockley posted The OERscars – and the winner is  in which he looks at some of the activity stream around ‘Dynamic Collections’ created as part of the OER Phase 2 Triton Project. From Pat’s post:

Dynamic Collections function as a WordPress plug in, bring in RSS Feeds from OER sites and blogs, and then search these feeds for particular words before moving these items into collections. These collections can be created as simply as a WordPress post, and so gives almost everyone the scope to start building OER collections straight away. Once a collection has some content, it can be displayed to visitors to the site (normally as a “wider reading” style link at the end of a post on a particular topic) and we made sure to track how these resources are used.  As well as showing as a WordPress page, the collections can also be seen as an RSS Feed (add ?rss_feed_collection=true to the end of a page), An Activity Stream – which will be handy for the Learning Registry (?activity_stream=true), or embedded into another page (?dc_embed=true) via some javascript.

I’m not entirely sure what my point is but thought worth sharing the information and links.