Recording thoughts about the first steps of a socia media journey is a bit like conducting a virtual reflexive ethnography. An ethnographer is always connected to the object of their research, which is why reflexivity is important. But let's not get all 'postmodern'... I am just thinking about Hine's book on Virtual Ethnography . In the ELSS course, we're asked to reflect on learning, with some of the learning also achieved 'by doing' (using SM) as well as by the traditional reading and online discussions. The course isn't about research, but having to maintain a blog reminds me strongly of my MEd project where I did something similar (but without public access). The 'field site' is the distributed environment (to use R&M's phrase) offering a rich social media ecology (Blogger, Flickr, Blackboard, Twitter and probably other platforms in future). Instead of going to a specific field site (eg Bb), I also followed field connections, eg links...
I used Wordle 'experimentally' to check out whether wordclouds would tell me something about the focus (or lack of focus) of student essays in the CPT module. It worked better than I thought: the 'right' words were clearly in evidence in one cloud, and missing and replaced by irrelevant terms in another cloud. It's worth using with students to visualise the focus of their pieces of work.
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