The “Sociometric Badge”: Measuring the Flow of Information and Ideas in Teams

March 29, 2012 by

Imagine wearing an electronic sensor that recognizes your communication patterns, e.g., your body language, tone of voice, who you talk to, where you talk to that person. What may sound like science fiction, has already been tested in the real world including innovation teams, post-op wards in hospitals, customer-facing teams in banks, and call centers.

What do you think? Would you wear it?

Dashboard summarizes data and helps people adjust their behavior.

Here is an interesting video with Alex “Sandy” Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory. He explains how it works. According to Pentland, the “dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams can be taught how to strengthen them.”

Key findings:

  • Patterns of communication are the most important predictor of a team’s success.
  • The best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings.

The summary of the article is available here.


Filed under Communications, Research Tagged with , , , , ,

“Visible Tweets”: A Free Animation Tool To Display Twitter Messages In Public Spaces

March 26, 2012 by 2 Comments

CTSI’s visibility on Twitter is growing – thanks to the tweets from CTSI programs and people like Anirvan (see his latest post AMIA 2012 Joint Summit: a report back in tweets).

But how can we leverage and highlight this activity, for example at upcoming events (retreats, conferences, symposia, etc.)? “Visible Tweets” is a great tool to do just that. Type in a search term, for example @CTSIatUCSF, and go…

Try it!

Tweets fly in and out… Here is an example.

Filed under Communications, Twitter, Visualizations Tagged with , ,

AMIA 2012 Joint Summit: a report back in tweets

March 23, 2012 by 3 Comments

Eric, Leslie, and I from CTSI at UCSF’s Virtual Home team spent the past three days at the AMIA 2012 Joint Summit in San Francisco.

Here’s some of what was happening on the researcher networking, social networking, knowledge representation fronts, and public search front, via Twitter:

Other tweets that caught my eye from the rest of the conference:

Filed under Collaboration Tools, Research Networking, Research Tools, Researcher Profiles, Search, Social Media, Social Networking, Translational Research, Twitter, UCSF Profiles

Embedding OpenSocial in Moodle

March 9, 2012 by 1 Comment

The CTSI team uses Moodle for online learning, and OpenSocial to embed applications into UCSF Profiles.

Lausanne-based doctoral student Evgeny Bogdanov recently combined the two, turning Moodle into an OpenSocial container. He describes how he embedded OpenSocial into Moodle by developing a Moodle plugin that interfaces with Apache Shindig:

“We present here a plugin that allows to bring OpenSocial gadgets into Moodle. OpenSocial gadgets are rendered via Apache Shindig (extension of version 2.0 that supports Spaces). Moodle is a Learning Management System used in many Educational Institutions (Universities) to manage courses. It is a plugin based PHP application that can be extended by installing additional modules…There are two different OpenSocial plugins for moodle.…This plugin was developed within the ROLE Integrated Project and is already used in 5 courses at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.”

 Read more:

Filed under Online Learning, OpenSocial

How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?

March 5, 2012 by 2 Comments

Twitter is getting its own standard format to fit the requirements of “publish or perish”. The Modern Language Association has developed a standard format. In his post, Alexis Madrigal takes a closer look at the shortcomings of the instructions. He writes:

It’s simple. Also, I just love the “Tweet” at the end. However, it’s curious that no URL is required, especially given the difficulty of Twitter search for anything not said in the past day or two.

Here are the instructions developed by the Modern Language Association:

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader’s time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet. However, they allow a researcher to precisely compare the timing of tweets as long as the tweets are all read in a single time zone.

In the main text of the paper, a tweet is cited in its entirety (6.4.1):

Sohaib Athar noted that the presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event.”

or

The presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event” (Athar).

Filed under Communications, Research, Twitter Tagged with , , , , ,

Boosting focus with the Pomodoro technique

March 2, 2012 by

Italiano: Autore: Francesco Cirillo rilasciata...

Pomodoro timer (Image via Wikipedia)

I sometimes find myself overwhelmed by tasks and projects, and find it useful to chunk up my work into focused sprints during a fixed time frame—a concept used both in software development and in various time management practices.

I’ve been finding myself using the Pomodoro technique, a fancy name for doing 25-minute sprints punctuated by 5-minute intervals.

There are a wide variety of simple Pomodoro timers available:

What techniques do you use to maintain focus while juggling projects?

Filed under Friday Fun

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 462 other followers

%d bloggers like this: