Twitter Search in Plain English

Twitter search and tagging is becoming increasingly relevant, especially in light of recent events in Iran. This timely video from Common Craft explains the basics of Twitter search, tagging, and trends. This may help people who are not currently on Twitter to understand it’s usefulness and relevance for capturing public thoughtstreams.

CBC Radio Interview on Twitter

I was recently interviewed by Sheila Coles of the Morning Edition about Twitter. We talked about some of the implications of Twitter for teaching, learning, and privacy. The full interview is available here.

Also related, Rocketboom has done a recent segment on “The Twitter Global Mind” and it’s definitely worth watching. My favourite quote from the piece: “Twitter currently controls the most contemporary thought stream humanity has ever seen.”

CBC Sask on Twitter

Jordan (a former student of mine) and I were briefly interviewed for a short CBC piece about Twitter. It is interesting to see the increased interest in the service by mainstream media, especially in the past several months.

Additionally, here’s an older piece from the CBC (March 2002) that discussed the implementation of highspeed Internet in every Saskatchewan school (was quite a big deal at the time). While there is a shared focus in the two pieces around connectivity, there is certainly a shift in what this means. In 2002, the focus here was in retrieving content/information. Now, the focus is much more on establishing human connections and social interactivity.

Behind Every Tweet: K12Online Presentation Teaser #2

My K12 Online Conference Presentation 2008 will be released one week from today. The conference has already started with Stephen Heppel’s Preconference Keynote and there are so many great presenters scheduled. To keep you interested, I thought I would release my second teaser. This one looks at the mystery behind every Tweet.

If you missed teaser #1, here it is. You may also be interested in the original teaser for my online graduate course.

I’ll link to my K12 Online Conference presentation when it goes up. Thanks for watching!

100+ eLearning Professionals on Twitter

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.

See List.

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.

Yammer: Organizational Microblogging

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. :-(

Yammer

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!

Check it out.