Dr Helen Webster, Research Associate, University of Cambridge

How to run a 23Things style programme

A guide for Librarians, Computer Officers, Learning Technologists, Learning, Researcher and Staff Developers, peer mentors etc. This guide is intended for anyone who wants to run a 23Things style programme. As the 23Things format is a peer-led, peer-mentored programme, it may be run by those who have a formal training remit such as staff developer, those for whom offering training of some sort may be part of their remit, or those who want to lead a grass-roots initiative for fellow students or colleagues. It is written from the context of Higher Education but may also be useful in other circumstances. The guide contains: What is a 23Things-style programme? Some of the initial decisions to make about the focus and format of a planned 23Things programme Resourcing and the Programme Team The materials Communication and infrastructure Publicity and recruitment Registration, data and evaluation Participant Support Timeline checklist of things to do

1. What is 23Things?
23Things is a peer-led, peer-mentored online programme, based around a central blog, which guides participants to explore a new Thing each week, and share their own reective blog posts on the Things with others. It runs in real-time, but resources are often left up for later participants to work through in their own time, or for reference. The original programme aimed to explore Web 2.0 technologies, and 23Things programmes model the social media they promote, capitalising on the ability of blogs and similar technologies to allow the programme organisers and the participants to communicate amongst each other easily by commenting on each others blogs and other interactions such as following and tweeting. The many-to-

many peer-mentoring aspect of the programme is one of its strengths. It is open and scalable, and is therefore a kind of MOOC: Massive Online Open Course. The original 23things programme was a professional development tool for librarians to explore web 2.0 technologies, set up by the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, USA. Similar courses have been run for some time in the UK by librarians at various Universities including Oxford and Cambridge, and elsewhere throughout the world. Versions of the original have been run for other groups, such as students and academics, and have been used also to explore and reect on other aspects of professional practice, rather than just social media and digital tools. The signicance of the number 23 is a little obscure!

2. Initial Decisions
Who is your programme for? Do you envisage a narrow or broad audience (e.g. similar or different professions / stages of career / areas of specialism or practice) and will they be geographically close (i.e. at the same institution) or dispersed, across several institutions? The more tightly dened the audience, the better the programme materials can be tailored and relevant to their contexts, practices and values and exploration of the Things can be embedded in their work. What is your focus? Some 23Things programmes aim primarily to increase participants condence in using web 2.0 technologies, and focus largely on the digital tools and increasing participants use of and engagement with them. Other programmes focus more on reecting on the issues raised by the impact of digital and social media on the profession, the individual tools being examples of technological possibility as well as potentially useful in their own right. Levels of engagement (i.e how many tools they use in the long term) may not be as important as promoting an informed and thoughtful decision about whether and how to engage, or how to assess the usefulness of new tools. Similar issues apply to programmes which focus on aspects of professional development other than social media tools. The focus you decide on and the level of reection and engagement you aim to encourage will depend on your audience. How long and diverse a programme do you want to run? Traditional 23 Things programmes will cover a Thing a week and thus run for 23 weeks (plus intro and wrap-up weeks, and any breaks or catch-up weeks) ; alternatively, they may cover two Things a week and thus run for 12-3 weeks. These approaches allow you to cover a wide range of Things, giving your participants a broad grounding. A third option is to break the programme into modules of 5-6 Things at a time, with a module running each term, perhaps. This approach allows you to develop thematically coherent modules which cover related tools and the ways in which they might be combined together as an overall strategy to address an issue. Participants are expected to blog fairly intensively during a programme, and drop-out can be high. A shorter, modularised approach can help to address this.

Do you want to limit participation? Depending on the size of your team or other resourcing issues and the amount of support you want to offer, you may want to limit the number of participants. However, as a form of MOOC, 23Things style programmes are easily scalable in terms of the numbers of participants engaging with the weeks Thing and blogging about it, and you may have others following the programme without blogging, but still gaining benet (and your own professional prole may be raised by running such a course), so it is recommended that you do make the programme and its materials as open and visible as possible rather than password protected. This may also affect the decision to use any institutional blogging platform or whether to use generally available ones such as Wordpress or Blogger. The main impact of numbers of participants will be made in the administration and support, particularly if you intend your team to read and comment on participant blogs, which is a valuable aspect of the programme.

3. Resourcing and the programme team

The Team Time is the main resource issue for running a a 23Things style programme. It is possible to run one alone, but may take up as much as a day a week or more, and if run as a grass-roots initiative alongside regular duties rather than as a dedicated role, may be too much for a single person. Moreover, a team better encourages timely response and the active many-to-many participation among the community which is a key part of the peer-mentoring support, whereas having a single leader can lead to passive consumption as in a central broadcast model. The team needs to cover the following roles: Administration of the programme platforms such as the blog and associated twitter feeds, facebook groups (including dealing with spam) and registration processes Organising publicity and running any launch events Researching and writing the materials (setting up the blog with information and FAQs, etc. as well as the weekly Thing post) Organising any face-to-face support or answering questions raised Reading and commenting on participant blogs each week Tracking participation Gathering and interpreting data such as evaluation

When assembling a team, it is useful to include an interprofessional mix to bring in different perspectives and expertise. , if it is run by one group for another, such as by learning developers for students, then in order to ensure that the programme

reects the practices and values of the audience and is embedded in and relevant to the kinds of work they do, the team should certainly include a member of the group at whom the programme is aimed. Including those with expertise in computing training and support (such as a computer officer), publishing, information management and copyright (such as a librarian), marketing and publicity, and professional development (such as a staff developer or careers adviser) might be very helpful, even in a consultative role. Money The programme is built using the free social media tools which it models, and therefore running costs are very low, unless you want to recruit or buy out a member of staff to run it. If you wish to offer face-to-face support, a launch event or an element of blended learning (see below) then venues and refreshments will need to be provided. If you feel that it is appropriate to incentivise and reward participation for those who complete with a small gift, then this too should be budgeted for.

4. Materials
Blog The central blog needs to be set up initially in advance of the programme launch, so that potential participants can be directed to it through publicity and nd out more about the programme. Set-up might include Welcome post, with a brief description of what the blog and programme are for, and information about when registration will open and when the programme will launch. Static pages: o About whos running the programme and who for; programme aims How the programme works (about 23things-style programmes) and FAQs. These should include any expectations regarding participants blog posts e.g. length, suggested content and structure. The programme content what Things it will cover Information on how to contact the programme team and stay in touch (any email list to subscribe to, how to follow the blog for updates, how to tag their own posts to they will be easily searchable, etc.) Information about how to join (including setting up a blog and registering with the programme. This information may be supplemented when the programme is launched and with Thing One)

o o

Useful links and further reading (perhaps linking to previus versions of the programme)

Widgets: o o o o o Follow blog by email/RSS etc Proles of blog authors/team members Blogroll or RSS feed of participant blogs so they can nd each other Creative Commons license, if desired/necessary Categories such as Things, Announcements, Events etc. so that participants can nd later posts using tags Links to the programmes prole on other platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook

Posts

Once the programme is launched, regular (e.g. weekly) posts will be published on each Thing. If they are being written by a number of authors, it might be helpful to agree a template and guidance on issues such as tone and style. Posts may be written up in advance and published automatically each week, or written as the course progresses so participants responses can be acted on. The structure of each post will depend on the focus of the course, but a sample might be: An issue or problem faced in the audiences practice A brief overview of a tool (or other Thing) which addresses this issue or problem A task to complete to contextualise exploring the tool, together with instructions for using it and/or links to tutorials etc. online if none are provided as part of the tool itself. Reective prompts whether a question or two to consider, or a full reective framework. A case study of the tool being used in this context

5. Communications and infrastructure

A 23Things style programme is built entirely using the digital and social media tools it explores, and thus models good practice and scaffolds the participants into using these technologies. Participants may need explicit encouragement to interact using these tools, as it is a signicant behaviour change, from passively consuming

to actively participating in online communication. Even if the programme focusses on learning other than digital and social media tools, this aspect may need to be embedded clearly within the programme to make it work. The central blog is the main point of contact with participants and one of the rst that they will encounter. A blog should be set up for the programme, and the team given access to it as administrators so that they can make the weekly Things posts and any other announcements. Other accounts such as Twitter can be set up using an email address such as gmail set up specically for the programme.

See Materials for suggested structure and content for the programme blog. Participants should be encouraged to comment on the central blog and on each others blogs too. A Google Drive form embedded in the blog can be used to register participants. The participants enter any data you wish to gather, including their blogs URL, and the data is imported into a Google Drive spreadsheet. A shared spreadsheet, on Google Drive, for example, can be setup to track participant blog posts and completion of the programme, and also whether a team member has read and commented on each blog post. Once they have registered, participant blogs can then be added to the central blogs blogroll, an RSS feed aggregator or social bookmarking platform so that participants can read and comment on each others posts. To begin with, familiar and commonly used communication routes such as email lists should be predominantly used to publicise the programme and to support the early stages of registration and getting started, so that participants are not excluded from communication routes that they are yet to explore in the course of the programme. Participants might be asked via the registration process to subscribe to an email list or provide their email address to be added manually. They should also be asked to follow the blog by email, for updates and to tag their own blog posts (and tweets) using a shared keyword. Other social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. also form part of the communications network which support participants, which they can use to share advice and ask questions as well as explore a more participatory, interactive presence online. It is useful to set up accounts or groups for the programme, such as a Twitter account or Facebook group that can be used to disseminate information and updates and bring participants together on other platforms. Where relevant, It might be helpful to secure any relevant usernames for the programme early on, using Namechk to ensure consistency in the programmes online identity, and a corresponding gmail (or other cloud email service) to set up new accounts for the programme, so that they arent linked from any one team members

personal account, but are accessible to other team members for administration. A signicant challenge is to encourage participation through blogging, but not to the the exclusion of those who are not comfortable blogging. Lurkers may also be gaining a great deal from following the programme, but without being visible to the programme team. You might like to explore ways in which other levels of participation can be encouraged and captured without compromising too much on the aims of participating actively in social media and peer support. This may be commenting on the central blog or setting up a group participant blog instead of writing their own blog.

6. Publicity and recruitment

Depending on how geographically dispersed your intended audience is, publicity might consist of a mix of traditional paper-based posters and leaets, and online announcements via email. Other digital platforms might be considered, but if the programme aims to introduce participants to these platforms, it might exclude the very audience that is intended. Any publicity should point interested participants to the central blog where they can nd out more and register interest. If participants are geographically close, for example, at the same institution, you might like to consider a launch event. This might be a talk or panel discussion with those who have some expertise in the subject, perhaps on a controversial aspect such as privacy or open access, it might be a taster of some of the Things which will be covered, or an overview of the issues raised, or it might simply be a chance for participants to meet face-to-face, which would be very valuable in beginning to construct the community which will be continued online.

7. Registration, data and evaluation

The minimum of data needed to register a participant is an email address and the URL of their blog, but you may wish to gather more data for evaluation purposes, for example, to assess the reach of the programme or to establish a baseline level of knowledge or condence to compare with at the end of the programme. You might also wish to gather information about participants access to software and hardware, such as if they are able to download and run software on their work computers, or have access to, for example, a microphone or webcam.

8. Participant Support
The ethos of a 23things style course is self-directed, peer-mentored learning, and building condence in exploring new Things, with a little guidance. The programme

is therefore not a format which relies heavily on face-to-face training or support sessions. However, you may nd that these are much requested by participants. Some help might be useful in the case of those who are really struggling to begin (perhaps an initial session on setting up a programme blog) but too much training of this kind undermines the nature and ethos of the programme, is very timeconsuming, and you may even nd that participants do not actually attend. A webinar format might be used to offer support remotely, using tools such as skype or Flashmeeting. You might wish to explore a blended learning format, which begins with an initial workshop to launch a module, with a mid-module workshop to encourage participants to support each other and share their knowledge and a nal session to discuss how the individual Things translate into an overall strategy. The more you are able to encourage the building of an online peer support network, the better. One of the main benets of this type of programme is not just the learning and condence in using the Things, but the change in behaviour from passive consumer to interactive participant in an online community. The programme can be a very good way to build an ongoing community or network in a professional area which may last beyond the life of the programme itself.

Timeline Checklist
Setting up Assemble team Agree aims, focus and format of the programme, and content (list of Things and order, structure and any other conventions of Thing blog posts). Surveying (formal or informal) of potential audience to guide this process might be conducted. Set timescales including date of publicity, date of participant registration opening and launch date. Assign roles and tasks including authoring of Thing blog posts Set up initial programme infrastructure: the blog and its initial contents (see above), Gmail and Google Drive, Twitter feed and any other platforms which will form the infrastructure Design publicity to be distributed by traditional channels: email, posters, leaets (depending on how geographically dispersed the intended audience is).

Launching If there is to be a launch event, organise and publicise.

Open registration to participants, gather the URLs or RSS feeds of their blogs, and collate as a blogroll, RSS feed aggregator or via a social bookmarking site so they can nd each other. Publish a blog post setting them the task of making their rst blog post introducing themselves and their motivations for participating in the programme, and commenting on at least two other participants blogs. Set up a shared spreadsheet to track participant blog posts for each thing, and whether a team member has read and commented on them.

Maintaining Ensure that the regular Thing posts are published each week Ensure that particpants blogs are read and commented on by a team member Introduce use of other platforms (e.g. Twitter) when appropriate Monitor participants engagement with each other through blog comments and other platforms to see if they are interacting and if there are any barriers to resolve (this may be addressed explicitly and embedded in tasks in later Things) Monitor comments on central blog and Twitter to pick up on any issues raised or questions asked

Wrapping up Write a nal blog post asking participants to review the programme and think strategically about the Things theyve encountered and developing an overall strategic approach to engaging with them in future. Distribute an evaluation survey to participants Check which participants have completed (you may wish to allow an extra week or two to allow participants to catch up) and arrange certicates, prizes etc. if offered. You might like to leave the central blog for future reference.