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As a teacher

• what do you need to know about Twitter,
• how do you use it,
• why is its useful for learning and teaching,
• When and where do you tweet?

What you need to know about Twitter?

1. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates (known as tweets) (wikipedia)
2. Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, so it’s a relatively new Web 2.0 application.
3. This is a great intro from the Common Craft people:
   
4. A tweet is like an SMS text message, but only 140 characters long, and Twitter is therefore sometimes described as SMS for the Internet (D’Monte)
5. Twitter has been ranked as the third most used  (Kazeniac) and as the fastest growing social network (Nielsen.com). So it looks like being around for a while yet, which makes it worth the investment of time needed to get to know any application.

How do you use it?

1. Create an account at twitter.com. Note that a form of a person’s real name is becoming increasingly used for their username, though many, like me, still use a nickname. Don’t make it too long as it forms part of the 140 character length.
2. Update your profile via [Settings]
   
   • Account Tab:
     • Add your real name and location so people can find you.
     • Add a brief bio – limited to 160 characters – shows on your profile page.
     • Only protect your tweets if you want to keep your tweets private i.e. approve who can follow you (this also keeps your tweets out of search results). I don’t personally see the point of this if you are using Twitter to share with your educational colleagues.
   • Password Tab: self explanatory, but you need this password not only to login and tweet, but also to use Twitter clients and APIs.
   • Devices Tab: If you want to you can tweet via your mobile, and have direct tweets (tweets sent to your privately) texted to your phone.
   • Notices Tab: Get told when you receive a new follower, have a direct tweet, or sign up for the newsletter. Probably worth turning these on at least to begin with.
   • Picture Tab: Add an image of yourself – people are more likely to follow you if you have an image.
   • Design Tab: Show your interest in Twitter and change from the standard design. There are lots of Twitter background creation apps around, but to start with use one of those available on Twitter.
3. Find people to follow
   
   
   You can search for any phrase, not just names. Click on [Follow] when you find someone you want to follow i.e. get their tweets. This is the point of Twitter, listen to other people’s tweets and share your tweets with other people.
   • There is a great list of edu-tweeters compiled by Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT). Why not add yourself?
   • You can search Twazzup.com in a similar way to [Find People] on Twitter. In addition to real-time tweets on your topic it also shows related keywords, suggested people to follow, news, most popular links, and influential/active/latest tweeters.
   • Common Craft explain Twitter Search:
     
4. Trending Topics (what’s hot) show on your Twitter home page (you need to be logged in). Note the hash tag in some of these.
   
5. Tweet: Once you have followed a few people and seen what they tweet about, it’s time to tweet yourself. The simplest way is to go to twitter, login and tweet in the [What are you doing?] box. As you will have seen you don’t have to literally tweet what you are doing. The question “What’s getting your attention?” is probably more useful.
6. Get a Twitter application or two. Having to go to Twitter each time can be a pain. So you will probably want to get your self a Twitter client. These help you to organise, read and tweet. Try out a few to see which you like best. These are my personal favourites.
   • Tweetdeck – connects you to Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and more.
   • Seesmic – recently added the ability to connect to Facebook as well as multiple twitter accounts.
   • Echofon – used to be called TwitterFox, great way to connect with Twitter if you use the Firefox browser.

Why is its useful for learning and teaching?

I blogged about 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education back in Aug 2008. So I won’t repeat myself entirely. But here are a few ideas about why I feel it’s useful for learning and teaching:

1. Keep yourself up-to-date with what other edu-tweeters are reading/thinking/doing. You can’t possibly read everything these days, so let others do some of the leg work, and reciprocate by tweeting about what you’ve read/seen. Feel free to ask questions too.
2. Keep parents in the know about what’s happening in your class/school. Have a school Twitter account with many people who tweet (helpful when someone is on leave)
3. Keep prospective students in the know about what’s happening in your institution/college/university
4. Keep your students in the know about things you’ve seen on the web that are useful for their course
5. Put a feed from your tweet/search into your LMS class site. Use # tags so you can tweet for numerous classes.
6. Promote your students’ stories (but be careful to maintain anonymity)

When and where do you tweet?

1. Many people tweet all the time, from work, from home, from their mobile whilst on the go (pls don’t do this whilst driving!). So where you do it is entirely up to you and the capabilities you have for doing it.
2. When you have something to say. Do the “I’m going shopping” tweet if you like, but if you want to be an edu-tweeter my advice is to mainly, well, edu-tweet.
3. It’s becoming more and more used at conferences as a “back channel” so people tweet about their impressions, thought about speakers, people they’ve met. Conferences often have a hash tag #hashtag which is included in the tweet so other people can follow all the tweets from the conference by searching for the hastag.

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This is a great video. If you needs some stats start here. Here’s some highlights of the things that struck a chord with me:

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber us baby boomers.
• Social media has over taken porn on the web
• Facebook added 100 million users in under 9 months
• At least on US college has stopped issuing email to freshmen – they don’t want one
• TV ads are out – watching Tv online is upcoming
• 35% of book sales on Amazon are on Kindle
• Social Media is a fundamental shift in how we communicate

Thanks to iLibrarian for this link.

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In case you’ve missed it there is a new report out “Engaging The New Influencers” from Edelman.

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In June 2009, Edelman convened 100+ professors of communication, journalism, business and pubic relations to discuss how companies and organisations effectively engage with their stake holders through social media. Here are some of the bits that I found applicable to education (bits in italics are my commentary):

1. Go where the people are: don’t expect them to come to you
   So that’s (e)Learning then
   
2. The digital era demands more active media users, which presents an opportunity for academia to integrate social media more into its curricula.
   More active, interactive learning!
3. Organisations can leverage social media to engage employees on any initiative, whether through knowledge-sharing, storytelling or connecting on a network to increase involvement and forge a sense of community.
   So the Vice-Chancellor will have twitter linked to their FaceBook account?
4. Digital communication is well-established and here to stay
   Faculty will have to embrace digital aspects of learning/teaching
5. In Asia one in three people access the Internet by mobile devices
   Our (e)Learning is already behind the times
6. Academic curricula should incorporate what the most appropriate social media tools to use are for specific tasks.
   Our students will need these tools as part of their working life. Faculty need a lot of professional development.
7. Every single website in the coming decade will have some sort of social functionality to it … and those that don’t are going to be at a disadvantage
   So what does your institution’s website look like. Time to engage with your readers!
8. Academia needs to better adapt to the media changes today to help develop the communications workforce of tomorrow.
   Listen up faculty, the way we teach has to change
9. Core skills – using text, photo slide shows with audio and video
   Faculty if you can’t do this now you need some PD. Sign up for the next course
10. Core skills – critical thinking, identifying a problem, taking a risk, offering a new solution
    Are you teaching problem solving or just expecting regurgitation of  facts?
11. Core skills – knowing how to compare content and determine which content is trustworthy
    Do you encourage students to collate information from lots of different sources (including the web) and justify their choice?
12. Core skills – social media principles so students can understand how to apply specific tools to a broader purpose
    A thread through the whole report then – students need social media skills to succeed in the workforce.

Interesting post on the Google Blog recently: “Five million students going back to school are “going Google”.

It relates of course to the number of schools using Google apps education edition.

I love Google apps and use them to share material with all sorts of people. But this post got me uptight by its northern-hemisphere-centricness.  Come on Google the southern hemisphere use your apps as well.

So please remember “fall” it may be for you northernies, but us southeries are in spring. And please don’t cut Australia in half on your map, or leave New Zealand off all together.

I spent the afternoon at Pukehou School again today.

I had the pleasure of working with AJ’s class, where we installed Picasa on all the class laptops. I demonstrated how it worked and the class had a great time experimenting with all the options.

A number of things struck me about the afternoon:

• although some of the class were more computer literate than others, there was no one who was hopelessly lost
• each and every child was keen to load in a picture and get going
• there is no fear about pushing all the buttons
• some of these kids have more computer skills than some of their teachers

Friends and colleagues have been saying for a long time in tertiary that students would come through with computer skills so we wouldn’t need to teach them. But year on year we have been finding that although they knew how to “play” with computers they didn’t know how to “work” with them.

Well, I think the tide is turning. At Pukehou they are learning computers skills in authentic situations. The kids are going to take a picture of their own piece of art, edit it in Picasa, record themselves talking about it with Audacity and the whole show will be displayed at parents’ evening.

Right on.

I’ll be writing up how to do the same in your class. So watch this space.

Image: rosefirerising

I am always really chuffed when my work gets a mention on other people’s sites. It gives me a nice glow inside. And of course it’s even better when you get included with a bunch of other people who are really great. So I was really really please to find an email in my in-box this morning telling me this blog had been included in a blog post “100 Best Blogs for Teachers of the Future“.

There are fantastic blogs in this list that I already follow like:

• Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day
• Cool Cat Teacher Blog
• Bud the Teacher

So now I’ve got a great list of others to have a look at. Great reading for the weekend.

Image: ponchosqueal

It’s been some while since I administered a Blackboard system, 2002 to be exact, but if this post from Ben Eison is anything to go by things have not changed a deal in the last seven years.

One of the things that frustrated me was Blackboard’s poor support. It wasn’t that the support staff were poor, rather that there weren’t enough of them and they were over in the states when I was in the UK. Every Bb user group meeting harped on about this fact. From what Ben’s post says things haven’t improved in this area. Bb used to tell us they were playing catch up as they were a victim of their own success. Fair enough, but after seven years you’d think they could have the support staff to customer ration right by now.

Other gripes noted in Ben’s post included, bugs that don’t get fixed, and lack of training materials.

The comments make interesting reading, so make sure you read those too.

Some comments point to open source as a solution and I couldn’t agree more. I am a fan of Moodle but there are lots of other OS solutions out there, Sakai and LAMS come instantly to mind.

Having put both Blackboard and Moodle into university campuses, I can honestly say Moodle will give you less headaches.

Image: Mike Le Sombre

Derek Wenmoth, in a post on the DEANZ blog, led me to this report from the US Department of Education.

A U.S. Department of Education analysis of  research studies undertaken between 1996 and 2008 concludes that:

• Blended Learning is the most effective mode of education;
• Online Learning is more effective than face-to-face;
• Face-to-face learning alone is the least effective method of the three.

Note that these findings are confined to tertiary education as the researchers did not find enough studies at the K-12 level.

The full report can be found here:
U.S. Department of Education (2009) “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies” (PDF)

Yep, that’s right my local library in Waipawa, Central Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, may be closing.

Times are economically hard I know but I would hate to see it go.

Libraries are central hubs for communities. They provide so much more than access to books. They are ways to meet people, information about what’s going on, help with information gathering, homework support, getting youngsters into reading.  You get the idea.

I have used free public libraries for half a century. I just couldn’t imagine life without one. Closing one, especially my local, is anathema. It’s like going backwards. 21st century life is supposed to an improvement on the 20th, but closing libraries in my view is not an improvement.

So what do you think about this closure? Head over to the council forum and have your say.

Image by Cindiann

By comparison with other times I’ve travelled through Singapore, the airport was empty this week. And the Auckland to Singapore flight was only about a third full.

If people aren’t travelling in general due to the economic turn down and the latest flu threat, then students probably aren’t keen for international study either. In New Zealand this is a big issue as many of our students come form over seas.

So many of our institutions should be turning seriously to eLearning as a way to capture that market. If the students aren’t coming to study, take the study to the students.

I will watch with interest to see how this pans out over the coming few years, which institutions will adopt this appraoch in an big way, and how will they fair?

What’s you institution doing? Is their eLearning approach expanding?

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SINT3.JPG