1. Lisa Lundgren & Kent J. Crippen University of Florida, USA
Developing social paleontology: A case study implementing innovative social media applications
Lisa Lundgren & Kent J. Crippen
University of Florida, USA 1

2. Building a community of practice* *Wenger, White, and Smith, 2009
Goal of our initiative
Building a community of practice*
Collaborative initiative supporting a paleontological community of practice. Paleontology is the study of extinct and ancient life on earth, most people think about dinosaurs when they think about paleontolgoy. Our community of practice describes groups of people who participate in and contribute to the domain of paleontology through situated practice. FOSSIL is uniting people from across the U.S. through participation in inquiry activities that are expressed in virtual and face-to-face environments. Participation in the community is defined as social paleontology, an open and collaborative exchange of ideas related to the collection, preparation, curation, and study of fossils. Social paleontology is expressed digitally through messaging within an ecosystem of technologies that includes social media (Wenger et al., 2009). For the Project to achieve its community goal, a social media campaign was deemed an essential element
*Wenger, White, and Smith, 2009 2

3. Educative social media niches
DEFINE EDUCATIVE: supprorting knowledge-building relative to a domain with a community. 3

4. Overarching research questions
Within these niches of the social media ecosystem,
What message design elements produce engagement with social paleontology?
Who are the people and institutions that constitute the community and serve as key actors in the social network? 4

5. Infrastructure Required
Inputs
Materials & Tools
Design principles for social paleontology (Crippen et al, 2016)
Marketing plan
Post Types
Canva
Hootsuite
Market Segments
Amateur paleontologists
Professional paleontologists
Educators
Message Elements
Hashtags
Images
Mentions
Questions
URLs
Practices
Storytelling
Leveraging interests to illustrate the full spectrum of paleo inquiry (Design Principle 1)
Supporting Inquiry
Recognizing the scientific merit of digitized fossil evidence within the spectrum of paleo inquiry (Design Principle 2)
Networking
Building relationships among institutions, people, places, and things (Design Principle 3)
Disseminating
Distributing content and educational resources (Design Principles 1-3)
Outcomes
Learning
Participation (e.g., connect, reach, follow)
Engagement (e.g., reaction, share, comment)
Community Building
Size
Social network structure
Indices of network centrality
Roles of professionals, amateurs, and institutions in the network
Social Media Plan
Prescriptive statements supported by evidence and sound reasoning.
The infrastructure for FOSSIL's social media campaigns was built using a logic model. In our logic model, we defined the relationship between inputs, our resources and investments, shown here in blue, the practices, our intended series of participant actions which will appear in orange, and outcomes, the short and medium term results of engagement in practices, which are shown in green.
The inputs were grounded in a conceptual framework designed by FOSSIL Project researchers, in which design principles for social paleontology were proposed following a formal needs assessment of the community. The marketing plan, developed by our website partner, Atmosphere Apps, was created from these design principles. The marketing plan was used to structure messages for our market segments, and we iteratively designed messages to meet the needs of our community (more on this later!)
The practices, the middle column of our logic model, are based on the conjecture that the inputs could be combined in various ways to illustrate three community practices that would entice members to "engage" on social media.
These practices in turn are conjectured to produce learning, community building, and our evidence-based social media plan as outcomes. 5

6. Challenges we encountered
Overcoming Obstacles
Incentivizes posting; encouraging pages to pay for newsfeed space
Limits post distribution to ~10 percent of total followers (Bugeaud et al., 2016)
Posts embody community interests and design principles
Likes, comments, shares indicate learning and spread our message
If you’ve developed a non-personal page for Facebook, you’ve probably seen these appear underneath your posts.
(ANIMATION) If you’re like the FOSSIL project, you were interested in getting your content to more people within the community, and you might have boosted a post or two.
The challenges in working with Facebook data that we’ve found are related explictly to these financial impedimnents that incentivize posting, encouraing pages to pay for their newsfeed space. Furthermore, the Facbeook algothrim strangles content distribution, limiting distribution to 10 percent or less of your “likers.” Those likers have to like, share, and comment in order for your posts to show up in additional newsfeeds.
To overcome these obstacles, we (READ) 6

7. How was the initiative received?
42%
increase
2285
3263
86% increase
626
1166
Evidence that we have a community 7

8. Testing for reliability and validity
Design-based research (McKenney & Reeves, 2012)
Testing initiative
Design initiative
Development of
initiative
Practical contributions
Theoretical contributions
Educative and evidence-based social media plan
Diverse knowledge building community that serves members and paleontology
Social media can leverage interests, illustrating the full spectrum of paleontological inquiry
Identifying community attributes can build relationships among institutions, people, places, and things
The initiatiev followed iterative cycles of design, designing, developing, and testing the intiative throughout the years. This is a key component of design-based research.
Design-based research focuses on solving complex problems through iterative design. As a design-based research initiative, the FOSSIL Project’s social media was designed to solve practical problems, in that we did not have an educative social media plan in place at the start of the project, and we needed to meet the diverse needs of the FOSSIL CoP members. The key to DBR is the contribution of both practical problems and to theoretical knowledge about the ways in which people learn. This two-pronged approach is what makes design-based research unique in educational research. We intended to understand how social meda…(READ) 8

9. Design studies timeline
Design Study 3
We employed three specific cycles of DBR, the first study ran from May 2014-May 2015, seen in vefrtical brown stripes, the second study, in lgith blue, ran from January –December 2016, and the third, a horizonal green line, was retroactive, as it looked at communtiy members throughout the life of the project. 9

10. Design studies overview
Design Study 1
Design Study 2
Design Study 3
What basic elements contribute to engagement with social media?
Which practice-based post types contribute to increased engagement?
Who are the people and institutions that constitute the community and serve as key actors in the social network? 11

11. Data Access and Forms of Analysis
Accessing account analytics
(Facebook Business Page Insights tab)
Monthly export of “post level” data
Analyzing Facebook-provided engagements
Accessing account analytics (ads.twitter.com)
Monthly export of tweet activity
Text,
content,
and
social network
analysis
Netlytic (Gruzd, 2016)
NodeXL (Smith et al., 2010)
Analyzing Twitter-provided engagement rates 10

12. Measuring Design Study 1
What basic elements contribute to engagement with social media?
Tiered levels of engagement
Posts which included a practice (storytelling, networking, supporting inquiry)led to increased engagement; likes constituted the majority of engagements
Message element variation
Active involvement in a learning task (Fauville et al, 2015)
1. No Interaction
User scrolls past post
2. Liking a post
User reacts, via clicking “like” [or hovering over it to add a different reaction]
3. Sharing a post
User includes post on own or another’s timeline
4. Commenting on a post
User adds own thoughts to a post
Design Study 1 asked what basic elements contriburte to engagement with social media?
The first component of this is message element variation. So, a post that included solely a hyperlink might garner different engagement than a post with a photo.
But what is engagement? Tiered levels of active involvement in a learning task. For social media, and specifically, for Facbeook, which we focused on for DS1, this was no interaction, liking a post, sharing a post, and commenting on a post.
We found that generally, our community engaged more fully with posts that included practice-based photos. Practice-based entails storytelling, networking, or supporting inquirry, like this post here about meeting up with our post-doctoral researcher, Dr. Ronny Leder,while attending an amateur paleontologist organized conference in Iowa. 12

13. Design Study 1: Learning Outcomes Achieved
Design modifications
Theoretical contribution
Modification of posts to include graphics
Development of social media posting protocol
Storytelling: Leveraging interests to illustrate the full spectrum of paleo inquiry (Design Principle 1)
Lundgren, Hendy, & Crippen, 2014
Lundgren & Crippen, 2015
As a result, the social media plan was modified to encourage more active engagement by requiring that all posts include graphics illustrating the practices. These modifications fed into the second cycle of design, which focused on practice-based post types. 13

14. Measuring Design Study 2
Which practice-based post types contribute to increased engagement?
Opportunity post on Facebook
Research post on Twitter
Post Type
Description
Information
General resources for paleontology, such as a geologic map or photo album from group’s event (i.e. Storytelling: Design Principle 1)
News
Post about a media outlet story featuring research but described for a lay audience (i.e. Storytelling: Design Principle 1)
Opportunity
Post which includes participatory action, such as a citizen science event, field trip, or talk (i.e. Supporting inquiry: Design Principle 2; Networking: Design Principle 3)
Research
Post describing scientific research, such as a link to refereed scientific journal article (Supporting Inquiry: Design Principle 2)
We then sought to further understand which practice-based post types garnered increased engagement. Therefore, we created an analytical framework based on our design principles, then categorized post types by practice. We found that generallly, the community engaged with all four post types equally on Facebook, but on twitter, there was a slight tendency to engage more so with information and research posts. 14

15. Design Study 2: Learning Outcomes Achieved
Design modifications
Theoretical contribution
All posts conform to one of four post types
Storytelling: Leveraging interests to illustrate the full spectrum of paleo inquiry (Design Principle 1)
Networking: Building relationships among institutions, people, places, and things (Design Principle 3)
Lundgren et al., 2015
Lundgren et al., 2016
Lundgren, 2016
We modifed our social media plan, indicatingt aht all future posts conform to the four post types. In terms of theoretical contributions, this study showed the importance of two of our design prinicples: storytelling and networking 15

16. Measuring Design Study 3
Who are the people and institutions that constitute the community and serve as key actors in the social network?
Lastly, we sought to further dsitill the people who consituted the FOSSIL community on Facebook and Twitter. Using publicly available information, including a thorough analysis of Twitter biographies and Facebook profile information that was cross-referenced with demographic data provided through other components of the FOSSIL Project, close to 30 percent of the Facebook community and 77 percent of Twitter community were successfully classified. Classification involved two schemes, one based on whether the member was an individual, group of individuals or institution and the second scheme was based upon the professional status of the member relative to the domain of paleontology. Members who worked within the scientific discipline of paleontology in an academic capacity, such as professors, curators, or graduate students, and to those who worked in private industry, including oil and gas consultants, were classified as professional paleontologists. Members who indicated that they were a member of a fossil club or society, expressed interest in paleontology and did not meet the criteria for professional were classified as amateur paleontologists. The category of other was used to denote k-12 educators and commercial paleontologists (those who sell fossils for profit or otherwise indicated a tangential interest in paleontology).
Following these categorizations, we performed a social network analysis on the FOSSIL Project Twitter account. We found that actors with higher centraility were non-professionals. The thick purple line incidcates the highest between centrality was that of an amateur paleontological organization. In traditional circles, professional paleontologists or institutions would have been said to be the conduits for informaiton, but we are seeing an emerging practice in which amateur paleontologicast can be connectors and conduits of informaiton.
Twitter connects members from across the spectrum of expertise. 16

17. Design Study 3: Learning Outcomes Achieved
Design modifications
Theoretical contribution
@mention networked individuals
Highlighting participants in practices
Networking: Building relationships among institutions, people, places, and things (Design Principle 3)
Lundgren & Crippen, 2017 17

18. Conclusions from Design Studies
Theoretical contributions: Social media can be used to…
Practical contributions: Educative and evidence-based social media plan
Create daily posts using social paleontology practice-specific hashtags (i.e. #TrilobiteTuesday)
Design branded, image-focused posts that are
practice-specific
meet identified design principles
are often hyperlinks to vetted paleontological websites
Respond to members in ways that encourage chains of communication through asking domain-specific questions and tagging community members
Leverage interests to illustrate the full spectrum of paleontological inquiry
Build relationships among institutions, people, places, and things based on community attributes (Hughes et al., 2012) 18

19. Further opportunities to design educative social media
Future Work
Further opportunities to design educative social media
Determining specific community members’ engagement with practice-based post types
Do amateur paleontologists engage more with information-based posts on Twitter?
How can we build educative social media for different scientific fields?
In what ways do our identified design principles apply? 19

20. Get in touch /lisa.lundgren.1989 @LisaLundgren21 @llundgren
/lisa.lundgren.1989
@LisaLundgren21
@llundgren
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. 20

21. References
Crippen, K. J., Ellis, S., Dunckel, B. A., Hendy, A. J. W., & MacFadden, B. J. (2016). Seeking shared practice: A juxtaposition of the attributes and activities of organized fossil groups with those of professional paleontology. Journal of Science Education and Technology. doi: /s
Fauville, G., Dupont, S., von Thun, S., & Lundin, J. (2015). Can Facebook be used to increase scientific literacy? A case study of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Facebook page and ocean literacy. Computers & Education, 82, 60–73. doi: /j.compedu
Gongla, P., & Rizzuto, C. R. (2001). Evolving communities of practice: IBM Global Services experience. IBM Systems Journal, 40(4), doi: /sj
Hansen, D. Shneiderman, B. & Smith, M. A. (2009) Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Hughes, D. J., Rowe, M., Batey, M., & Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), doi :
Lundgren, L. (2016, November) Social paleontology on social media: A case study in developing social media best practices for museum projects. Museum Computer Network Conference (MCN), New Orleans, LA
Lundgren, L. & Crippen, K. J., (2015, March) The FOSSIL Project: Using social media to develop a community of practice, University of Florida Annual Conference for the Social Sciences, Gainesville, FL
Lundgren, L. & Crippen, K. J. (2017, March) Describing social paleontology from an ecological perspective, Annual Meeting, Northeastern Section, Geological Society of America, Pittsburgh, PA
Lundgren, L. & Crippen, K. J. (submitted). Developing social paleontology: A case study implementing innovative social media applications, The Social Media in Practice Excellence Awards 2017, Vilnius, Lithuania.
Lundgren, L., Crippen, K. J., MacFadden, B., Ellis, S., Dunckel, B., & Gardner, E. (2016, April) Social media messaging and engagement with paleontology in an online community of practice, Annual International Conference for the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST), Baltimore, MD
Lundgren, L., Crippen, K. J., MacFadden, B., Dunckel, B., Ellis, S., & Gardner, E. E. (2015, November) Exploring social media as a research tool for measuring engagement in a paleontological community of practice, Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD
Lundgren, L., Hendy, A., & Crippen, K. J., (2014, October) The design of social media messages for promoting engagement in an online community of practice, University of Florida Graduate Student Research Day, Gainesville, FL
MacFadden, B., Lundgren, L., Crippen, K. J., Dunckel, B., & Ellis, S. (2016) Amateur paleontological societies and fossil clubs, interactions with professional paleontologists, and the rise of 21st century social paleontology in the United States. Palaeontologica Electronica 19(2), 1E.
McKenney, S., & Reeves, T. C. (2012). Conducting Educational Design Research: Routledge.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press
Wenger, E., White, N., & Smith, J. D. (2009). Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities. Portland, OR: CPsquare. 21