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I love twitter and the random proximity of tweets

26 June, 2009 – 11:21 am

Twitter, one of the world’s fastest growing social networking/microblogging services, gets some good press and some bad press. It’s a timewaster, pointless, full of mundane 140 character tweets about what people had for breakfast, say some. Personally I love it. I’ve posted before about Twitter and now I’m totally completely in thrall (well at least till the next big thing - probably Google Wave).

Why? Why does Twitter work for me?

1. Professional learning

Lots of people and organisations use Twitter to post resources, information, news, projects, comments, opinions, questions, reflections, ideas, suggestions. I’ve chosen to follow the people and organisations that are relevant and of interest to me - at the moment there’s about 250 of them.  Those that don’t delivery quality, relevant content get ‘unfollowed’ - those that remain have proved their worth. I no longer have to seek out information - fantastic, insightful, relevant, well written information comes to me via 140 character tweets filtered by people and organisations relevant to my own interests. Smart, innovative thinkers, people who question and wonder, are using Twitter and I’m able to participate, consider and ruminate along with them.

2. Immediacy

I’m getting that information ‘as it happens’ rather than waiting for Google or some other search engine to index it, and then for me to discover it - assuming it’s somewhere in a format that is indexed. I don’t have to rely on an algorithm to find me what it thinks I might be looking for. I don’t have to find relevant resources by looking through hundreds, thousands, millions of search results which may or may not be relevant (and who does that - it’s all down to the top 20) - it’s coming from my trusted sources and I can act on it immediately. When writing reports and doing research, this immediacy and authority of information is fantastic: you can be taking the latest thinking from trusted sources into account in your research right up to the last minute.

3. Networks

It’s enabled me to connect with people networks here in Canberra that communicate via Twitter and a range of other social networking services: and that’s another interesting thing - Twitter does not act alone in the social networking space. The people networks in Twitter often also have presences on Google docs, Ning, discussion lists, and other places and Twitter provides a kind of rolling commentary on what’s going on across that space. From following Canberra-based tweeps (people who tweet on Twitter), many of whom work in or with government agencies, I’ve come to ‘know’ a number of people quite well, what they think, what they are doing, and their areas of interest, as well as initiatives, projects etc they are involved in, as well as challenges, ideas, opportunities. In a government town, this is useful.

4. Serendipity

As you follow more people serendipitous discoveries occur: like reading headlines as you flick through a newspaper, the Twitter feed throws up ideas, comments, sources and resources that send your thinking in new directions. The potential of microblogging services to enable innovation purely through the random proximity of tweets as they flow past a user will, no doubt, be a PhD topic of the future.

5. Time saver

Some people argue that Twitter is a time waster. I find it to be the opposite. I have it running in my browser and just monitor what’s going on. Obviously I suffer from continuous partial attention disorder and have multiple connections running in my head simultaneously. I take notice of some tweeps more than others, and as I scan I take notice of some words more than others. Also, as much of the material I’m interested in is new, novel or innovative, if I was searching for it, I wouldn’t know what I was looking for. Now it finds me.

6. Broader than education

While I follow a lot of individual educators and educational organisations, I follow a range of others types of people too: those that work in ICT more generally, librarians, politicians, a few cultural organisations, a couple of IT news agencies, organisations like Creative Commons, libraries, and general news organisations like the ABC. This means that my knowledge of ‘what’s going on’ is broader than the education sector, but still relevant to my area of interest. This is good: the less siloing of knowledge and information, the better.

7. Bigger than Australia

People and organisations I follow are both from Australia and places other than Australia - such as the UK and the US. For me, they need to be English-language tweets as I don’t have time to use a automatic translater. But that, I’m sure, will become a service available one day, and enable a social networking between cultures regardless of the tweet’s original language.
Twitter, or any microblogging service, is not for everyone, any more than any other technology service. You have to have a reason to use it and a continuing reason to find it useful.  For me, I find it very useful in my professional life.

I use it from my laptop, and not from my phone or mobile device - though many can and do - so I’m only connected when I’m at the computer. As I telecommute it also prevents any sense of isolation developing: I’m connected, I’m networked.
I also find it fascinating that every person’s experience of Twitter (or another microblogging service) is different. Each tweep will follow their own set of people and organisations; a different set will follow them.

Twitter is not one-size-fits-all: every person creates their own network. Everyone to their own.

You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/girtbysea

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, social networking, Twitter, SICTAS | Comments (0)

Heading into the cloud: cloud computing and education

23 June, 2009 – 2:17 pm

Cloud computing is another buzz word spilling into the education sector and IT press.

What does it mean for a teacher, for education, for a school?

In simple terms cloud computing enables you to access software applications, hardware, data and computer processing power on the web, rather than loading software onto your own computer or school server. That is, using the ‘cloud’ means using the internet as your own personal computer, processor and storage environment, accessing it with any internet-capable device, from any physical location 24/7/365.

It’s always on, always available, accessible from anywhere.

The term ‘cloud computing’ is synonymous with the terms ‘Software as a service’ (SaaS), a hosted service, or utility computing. And for anyone who wants to work from multiple locations – such as different campuses, home, conferences, and while travelling – cloud computing makes perfect sense. Use a free open web service for collaboration with colleagues (groups.edna.edu.au), a bookmarking service for saving and annotating online teaching resources and articles (delicious.com), a mindmapping tool for brainstorming (www.mindomo.com), Google docs for calendars, document sharing, photo sharing, and Facebook (www.facebook.com) for keeping up with friends and family – the range and sophistication of the web software available is amazing.

Using any or all of these services is a simple matter – register for free, agree to the terms and conditions, and then use the application. You don‘t pay, you don’t sign up for a plan, you (usually) don’t have to download anything, or pay licensing fees. For an individual, this is web heaven.

What does it mean for education? Read More »

By Jen | Posted in Educationau | Comments (1)

Too rude? Blogging and tweeting at conferences

23 February, 2009 – 10:55 am

At a recent national conference about new technologies, education and the way forward - sponsored by government - the conference convenor began the event by telling people there was wireless internet access with some power points to plug laptops into at the side of the room, but she would prefer it if people didn’t ‘check their email’ during the conference, but paid attention to the presenters, as they had useful things to say.

I was struck by this at the time because it completely misunderstands the way mobile technologies are currently being used at conferences - as a way of disseminating knowledge and communicating with a community of people that care about the same things: your professional learning network. That someone with that kind of thinking about technology was running that kind of conference did not bode well…
So what happens - can’t attend a conference? someone might be live blogging. Someone else might be tweeting. Others might be taking photos and uploading them on flicker. So people perusing their mobile phones, PDAs and laptops may in fact be the most attentive audience members in the room. They are listening, summarising and posting to the web for others to read.

It’s not the same as being there, but there is a usefulness in a savvy person posting the core messages of the presenter. Watching the tweets go by in a browser-based live updater is a bit like scanning the headlines in the newspaper: you get a good sense of what’s going on, without the detailed explanation, but you also can get added commentary from the audience members and that community that cares.

Live blogging and tweeting has caused some discomfort at some conferences where the idea of someone doing something while a presenter presents is considered rude by some.That is, not paying full attention. But they are: that’s the irony. Those that are sitting in rows, stony-faced staring back at the presenter are not necessarily engaged: they just have their eyes open.

There’s a couple of good discussions on this topic: at Graham Wegner’s and at KerryJ’s blogs.
Although I haven’t presented at a conference where live blogging or tweeting was wide spread, I can only imagine that it will improve my presentation skills. Not just the 20 or 30 - people in the room are going to hear what I say - potentially hundreds or thousands more will find out about what I think. And if I’m bad: I can imagine that the tweets may not be complimentary.
It is good then to see that the National Library Innovative Ideas Forum 2009 to be held in March is “encouraging” blogging and tweeting, and tellingly says ‘Bring your laptop and participate’. So the laptop is now seen as method to engage, rather than the use of it in session suggesting disengagement. Yay. Along with a pod of mobiles and PDAs I guess we’ll see a whole lot of blogging going on.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, blogs, innovation, future, SICTAS | Comments (13)

Education.au report on Collaboration in Teaching and Learning published

18 February, 2009 – 2:07 pm

Education.au is providing a Strategic ICT Advisory Service to the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The report on Collaboration in Teaching and Learning is the first public report from this service.

The report focuses on the information and communications technologies that enable collaborative learning to happen online and includes school education, vocational education and training, and higher education.

The report:

  • briefly describes the theories that underpin collaborative learning, the skills that are necessary for its success, the implications of collaborative learning for teaching practice, for students, and the spaces in which learning occurs.
  • recognises the challenges in enabling collaborative learning including providing professional learning for teachers, knowledge, information and identity management, and managing continual change in tools and technologies.
  • found that effective collaborative learning using ICT is dependent on services and skills that are not specific to collaborative learning, but are essential for the provision of ICT more generally
  • makes four recommendations that complement existing initiatives and priorities of the Australian Government.

Recommendations

  • provide access to post-secondary education options for remote and regional Australians leveraging the investments being made through existing broadband initiatives
  • extend the digital education revolution to the VET and university sectors
  • task a national body to work through national partnershiops to reduce fragmentation of effort, and make best user of investments made in ICT in education at a broad level, and collaborative learning in particular
  • embed new media literacy skills into Australia’s national curriculum in a consistent way, independent of specific technologies


By Jen | Posted in Educationau, social networking, innovation, standards, privacy, future, just in time learning, wikis, higher education, digital natives, learning spaces, indigenous, early childhood, national curriculum, identity, Facebook, SICTAS, information literacy, iwb | Comments (2)

On the horizon for 2009: the Horizon School?

23 January, 2009 – 1:08 pm

Already I’m feeling a little weary. It’s only January and it seems that already there’s more technology on the horizon that may need to be integrated into teaching and learning.

The Horizon 2009 report, produced by the New Media Consortium and Educause, has been released and its focus is on emerging technologies and higher education.

Within the next year they are of the view that mobiles and cloud computing are the next big things. Given the rate of organisations to change, and pedagogies and assessment modes to change, this seems to me to be a bit on the fast side.

In the next two to three years the technologies to watch are ‘Geo-everything’ and the Personal web.

In the next three to five years we’re looking at semantic aware applications and smart objects.

If we add these to the technologies from last three Horizon reports we’ve got a lot of technologies to look out for:

  • social computing
  • personal broadcasting
  • The phones in their pockets
  • educational gaming
  • augmented reality and enhanced visualisation
  • context aware environments and devices
  • user created content
  • social networking
  • mobile phones
  • virtual worlds
  • new scholarship and emerging forms of publication
  • massively multiplayer educational gaming
  • grassroots video
  • collaboration webs
  • mobile broadband
  • data mashups
  • collective intelligence
  • social operating systems

How these will all fit together and make sense in a teaching and learning context, assuming they are taken up, is the challenge. How we learn how to teaching using them, assess them and are clear about what it is our students need to learn and have to learn are also questions.

I see some repetition in the nominations over time which suggests to me that maybe technology is not changing as fast as it sometimes seems. Themes that are emerging and perhaps it’s more useful to focus on them rather than this year’s nominations in isolation. The themes I can see here include mobile computing (of various kinds), immersive/interactive online environments, people creating content, and people networking.

Under these headings is a vast array of possible tools, technologies and applications.
It would be great to have an Horizon School where, as technologies and tools are identified, they are showcased, proofed, trialled, tested, have pedagogies and assessment processes developed around them for all levels and for different purposes. And all of this would be free, and online and you could download it and use it - rather than each of us trying to make sense of it all on our own.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, innovation, future, SICTAS | Comments (6)

Obama - a man of the 21st century

19 January, 2009 – 2:41 pm

I can’t let pass without comment the fact that the leader of the United States of America - one of the largest of the world economies, the so-called ‘leader of the free world’, has had to fight hard to keep using his Blackberry.  It came as an extraordinary revelation to me that the incumbent US president - and those before him - did not have a computer on their desks, did not have a PDA, did not have their own email accounts.

My question is: how did they ever get anything done? How did they form and maintain relationships that were not mediated by others? How did they find out stuff for themselves?
It is a relief to find that Obama has not given into pressure to get rid of his Blackberry, nor seems too worried that any communication can be used against him. It means that Obama will be able to talk to whom he wants, when he wants, outside the control of others. He can Twitter and email, browse the internet and look at any information provided by anyone or any group that’s available online.

He can make up his own mind.

Obama, along with our own Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, has a Twitter feed. While Twitter can be used only as a broadcast mechanism, (people follow you, you don’t follow others) Obama, Rudd and Turnbull  also ‘follow’ those that ‘follow’ them. This has enormous potential benefits for politicians - if they choose to use it.

What this means is that I now have a direct (on)line to the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Australia and the leader of the Liberal Party opposition.

I’m not suggesting that Barack, Kev and Mal are likely to read all my tweets (well, any…), but I’m sure staffers will be casting their eyes across them (and those of the thousands of others that they follow) to look for issues, concerns and problems raised - issues that are unmediated by professional media and bloggers but delivered direct from an ordinary person to the powerful.

There is real potential for those in authority to engage with the concerns of ordinary people (well at least those who are online and web-savvy). In a time of global financial crisis, knowing where people are hurting in a timely fashion - before real damage is done - could be telling. Getting people at the chalkface to tell you directly via Twitter (and similar services) what’s really needed in schools, TAFEs and Universities may be different to content provided by those who do not have the same day-to-day experience.

It also tells us something about those individuals. Obama’s twittering was clearly part of a the overall campaign strategy. Rudd’s is a ‘telling us what he’s doing’ feed probably managed by his press office (not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, but it’s not really Kev). Turnbull uses Twitter to engage with others in conversation - his personality and interests are on display and it’s clear he is following up on comments and problems tweeted by constituents and is developing a community of followers - not just numbers of followers - and that’s the point of all of this.

That Obama will have a Blackberry now secures the place of the mobile device as the gadget of the 21st century. Its influence and relevance is assured.

Obama has got a Twitter feed. The influence and relevance of microblogging is assured.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, social networking, Twitter, SICTAS | Comments (4)

Bringing your bits together: Posterous and FriendFeed

19 January, 2009 – 1:59 pm

In the past I have lamented my fragmented web identity. Today I’ve found a couple of tools that can help me bring those things together and also combine the outputs of other similarly challenged people so that I can see all their stuff and my stuff.

These are Posterous and FriendFeed. I haven’t quite mastered either of them and only have a cursory knowledge of how they work, but they do seem to solve some of the problems of aggregating and distributing my own content - though I think to make all of this work a flowchart of how the different envrionments work together wouldn’t go astray. ;-)
Posterous enables you to run all your social networking via email - focusing on email supplied by one of the free web mail providers like Gmail or Yahoo. The use of email is a great idea (imho) as, firstly, it means you can run everything from one interface.  Secondly posterous can be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other services so that you can post once and the content can go to the various services. Thirdly, most people ‘get’ how to use email, so the barriers to entry are low. It may be a good way to lead people into publishing their own content, introducing them to social networking services and understanding the power of content sharing.

This does depend on you knowing/remembering the right email addresses - which  are posted on the site -  but it does reduce and/or eliminate doing the same thing more than once. In this scenario you do things once and post/email them to the various services and then can see it all from your Posterous website where it’s automatically displayed.

FriendFeed is different in that it aggregates your pre-existing content into a single feed using RSS and you can then (if you wish) distribute/make available this aggregated feed. For those of us who have Facebook, Twitter, a blog, Delicious, YouTube, and Flikr (etc etc) accounts and presences and use them for different media/reasons, this kind of aggregation brings all your content and comment together. (Yay!)

It also enables you to include feeds from your friends that are on FriendFeed so you can get an aggregated picture of their web activity too.

In the FriendFeed scenario you continue to update your services separately and then are able to view the aggregation and make that available.

The FriendFeed option would be a good collaborative tool, enabling team members to work on various aspects of a project and aggregate the components.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, social networking, SICTAS | Comments (2)

Moodle vs Blackboard

25 November, 2008 – 9:04 am

The University of Canterbury in NZ has reviewed Moodle and Blackboard as replacements for its current Learning Management System. For other organisations undertaking this kind of evaluation the documentation may provide a bit of a short cut for your own process. You can read the Exec Summary or read the whole set of documents.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, evaluation | Comments (0)

Web 2.0 tools - explained in three minutes or less - in plain English

27 October, 2008 – 12:14 pm

This series of videos, from small US company Common Craft, are a quick (most less than three minutes), appealing and straightforward introduction to a number of popular Web2.0 tools including social networking, social bookmarking, podcasting, blogs, microblogging and wikis. For those trying understand Web2.0 tools and don’t ‘get it’ or want to ‘get it’ but don’t know where to start, you’ll be hard pressed to find clearer introductions. And they would also be useful tor those looking for good intro materials for students or for professional development sessions.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, social networking, YouTube, blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, SICTAS | Comments (0)

Conversation about collaboration in teaching and learning: contribute now

20 October, 2008 – 9:28 am

We’re into the second week of our discussion about collaboration in teaching and learning with some interesting points being raised. So far we’ve been talking about digital natives - is there such a thing?, digital collaboration tools, whether e-moderation skills are necessary, and what makes collaboration work.

To participate:

Register with edna groups at http://groups.edna.edu.au

Go to the group at http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=2010

Use the invitation key CTL2010 and join in! We’d love to have your views and ideas.
The Collaboration in Teaching and Learning discussion forum is at http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/mod/forum/view.php?id=58618

By Jen | Posted in Educationau | Comments (1)