Measuring, Tracking and Analyzing PKM Activities
I’m surrounded with people concerned by measures. I’m no so much in love with numbers wich could sound strange for someone who deals with programs, numbers and did maths studies. However, I felt this topic should come one day.
Marketers and writers are interested in audience measure, tracking paths from tweets to landing pages and eventually downloads or signups. We are all marketers somewhere, especially all of us running businesses or in management positions. Techniques, terminology are also very similar between marketing and learning professionals. I attended last Monday #sBizHour on Social Measures and Analytics. Brian asked who knows about https://analytics.twitter.com the tool from twitter: free, open to all. A great source of understanding who is reading the knowledge we share. In the past, we used logs on web sites to measure visits, origin, frequency, lengths and deduct which content was doing the best. Are you still doing it? What do you get from it? Do you use more perfectionated tools that offer a broad view of the path of the visitor? Is it important for someone just willing to share what he knows?
PKM is a collection of processes. Some of those processes require some regularity (
ref last week chat on Sense-Making), some sustained persistence in our efforts. We shared best practices in terms of
setting goals,
creating habits. We shared also on Twitter the different devices (paper, apps) we use to track our efforts. Kneaver or WordPress integrates some analytics also. Do such measures really help us build habits? What should be the frequency? Does it helps for habits forming with periodicities over the week? Remember how data serves as evidence to deliver
Open Badges? Should we be weary about what is collected on us?
I’m also working on xAPI. First because it interests me but also because I found it handy to use inside Kneaver. During various presentations and chats around it I hear people talk about tracking: tracking time, hesitations, tentatives, devices used. I wonder sometimes if the ease to track whatever don’t make us overly hungry of data without thinking how we can really use them. Not all data is meaningful as we see often with pictures on social graphs or words frequencies. Do you want to have more of your activities tracked? What about every time you reach out to your apps?
We have seen people trying to analyze their social graph or more precisely their PLN and build lists on them. What kind of measures could help us here? Followers growth, engagement quality and length? Do you use them, why not?
Now great you got all those measures and Excel spreadsheets filled. What are you doing with it? Do you have the background in analytics required to make sense out of it? Could you share some tips, advices, apps to use?
PKMChat being about Personal Knowledge Management encompass Knowledge lifecycle in general. Our first chat was about learning, acquiring Knowledge. Our second is about sharing it. Week after weeks we will switch from one end of the lifecycle to another while exploring all the channels that could be used: social, formal, writing, videos. Feel free to suggest topics by tweeting to @pkmchat.