I took part in a Twitter encounter [ #ASEChat ] between the ASE and NAEE the other night with environmental education as the focus. Although I never quite discovered what the purposes were, just having an encounter seemed almost worthwhile enough given the historic lack of contact between these groups. Pondering it all, afterwards led to my wondering just how you might evaluate such events. What’s to count? For example, which of these might matter:
- The number of people taking part
- The range of people involved
- The number of tweets produced
- The extent of interchanges between people (as opposed to mere statements)
- Retweetings
- Favouritings
- Whether anything remotely sensible was said
- Whether anyone seemed to learn anything
- Whether anything happened as a result ...
Clearly, there are things here that you can count, and some do tell you potentially useful things: the number bothering to get involved, for example. The ASE, which hosted the event, says that 36 people took part with 210 tweets during the hour (and more outside the allotted time). Of course this only captures the data flowing through #ASEchat, and other conversations did take place outwith that. Time will tell whether this has been a stimulus for NAEE to engage further with a major institutional beast which, historically, has not taken environmental education all that seriously.
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