If you still haven’t gotten into Twitter, but are looking for another reason to check it out, this may help. The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies has put together a list of 100+ eLearning professionals that you may want to follow on Twitter. Disclosure: I was included on the list, so I feel a bit funny promoting it.
Twitter has been and continues to be one of the most important tools for communicating and connecting within my personal learning network. If you want to give Twitter a try, the list of people to follow would be a great place to start. From there, you may discover some of the other great people that SHOULD be on the list, those that I take value from every single day.
I ran across Yammer tonight. From the demo video found on the home page, Yammer looks much like Twitter but your potential network is defined by your organization’s domain (like Google Sites). I see later that Yammer is billed as “Twitter for Enterprise“.
So I signed up using my uregina.ca domain. Looks like I’m the first and only one there. One is a lonely number when you are dealing with social networks. :-(
I really like the concept of Yammer, and am already thinking about how I could use it as a communications tool in my next class, or actually use it with my colleagues. Wow, that could be really useful!
There has been some importantdiscussion as of late about renegotiating relationships and our ties with social network tools and online spaces. For those of you still finding your way, here’s a cute video that may help.
This is part of a viral advertising campaign from meetup.com. The company’s strategy tagline is “use the Internet to get off the Internet.” Check out the “get your friends unplugged” page, where you can send your friends a reminder to get offline. Yes, it’s viral marketing so as always, carefully critique the sender and the message.
The WELL is one of the oldest online virtual communities. This video from 1989 features interviews from WELL members. It is an interesting look back at the experiences of pioneering virtual network participants. One could replace “the WELL” from the audio with Twitter (or another popular social network tool) and it would hardly be noticeable.
I already use a blog and an RSS aggregator. Is adding Twitter as a tool to post and receive information going to enhance or burden my learning experience? Is it that I need to follow only those who use Twitter effectively to enhance my learning opportunities? If so, what is “effective” twittering and how does it differ from effective blogging? Is the energy required to add Twitter to my toolbox and follow Twitterers worth the payoff? Are really good ideas and resources found often enough on Twitter that never surface in blogs?
I sent a link to his post via Twitter and asked people to respond. Within a couple of hours, he received 23 posts, many of them very insightful.
Sometimes I worry that my sharing of links in Twitter may be seen by some as spamming. After all, dropping links into Twitter does not usually answer its prime question “What are you doing?”, and to some, that may be perceived as breaking one of the Twitter commandments.
A while back, I shared the comiqs.com link. Brian Van Dyck, a middle years teacher located in Sunnydale California, thought there might be some potential for his students. I noticed these recent tweets from Brian.
@courosa the http://comiqs.com/ was a hit with 6th graders. Book reports and story boarding for narrative writing underway. Thank you! (link)
@courosa One of my students is featured on Comiqs. Working on “How To” writing. http://tinyurl.com/ynrjwd One proud teacher here. Thanks. (link)
This is a really neat piece from a very creative 6th grader, and it demonstrates the potential for a tool like this in the right hands, with the appropriate encouragement from a teacher. This is great to see, Brian. Do congratulate your students!
And, to get to a bigger point, I still think it is amazing to see such a tiny digital event can positively affect students over 2700 kilometres away. This is the type of thing that I have experienced many times, but usually on the recipient end. My students and I have benefited countless times from the Twitter network, and this reciprocity may be one of the most compelling reasons I have for my continued use of Twitter.
2007 was certainly the year of Twitter. Late last night I saw a tweet from Tim Lauer referring me to a Perl script from Damon Cortesi “that pulls down your public tweets and allows you to graph them using Numbers.” Pretty neat! Here is what it came with.
