Twitter Chatter

Posted on 24 February 2013 by Jim

This started as a FaceBook reply and grew into a blog post.  I’ve had a Twitter account for 2 years but only started using it recently. Others have posted far superior step-by-step Twitter instructions (see Christopher Lehman So You Think You Want to Tweet Chat or a this 2010 blog post “How to Attend Twitter Parties“)

This isn’t so much a how-to as a “what I’ve learned” from one novice to other novices. Corrections are welcome.

1. If you are just creating your Twitter account, consider the length of your Twitter name.  Even though your name is not counted in the 140 characters of your own posts, the length does become significant when someone uses your name in a reply or retweet.  You may not want a totally anonymous one like I chose back when I was more paranoid about privacy, @xb7r, but mine has the virtue of leaving more room for someone who replies or retweets me than if I had chosen a long descriptive name like say, @connectedEducator.

2. Instead of just using your twitter.com page for reading and tweeting, consider using a Twitter client (aka Twitter aggregator). Tweet Deck is my current favourite. It displays multiple columns so you can follow different users or tags simultaneously – you can even have a column to show tweets from other people who mention you (so you don’t miss replies). It also automatically shortens links you insert, saving a side-trip to bitly.
Another great tool is TweetChat – no download or install, it runs in a browser. TweetChat displays only a single column filtered by a hashtag, but is ideal for Twitter chat sessions because it automatically adds the hashtag to anything you tweet.

3. Tweet Deck is free, available for desktop/laptop or for mobile devices. I installed an older version of Tweet Deck on my Windows computer because I heard complaints about changes made since Twitter acquired the software. I got it from here http://www.oldversion.com/windows/tweetdeck-0-38-2
I run the latest Tweet Deck from the app store on my iPhone. It’s great for following at conferences, but I can’t one-finger type rapidly enough to fully participate in a twitter chat session. You can also run Tweet Deck on the web (in a browser) at http://www.tweetdeck.com/ but I found that unsatisfactory.

Three points of advice is enough.  Here’s something I tried and liked it.  In Carol Yeager’s CMC11 Twitter chat-session earlier today, I ran TweetChat in a narrow browser window side-by-side with Tweet Deck in its own window.

tiled twitter aggregators

screenshot – tiled for chatting

Tweet Deck updates more quickly when there is lots of traffic, where TweetChat lags behind by a quarter of a minute or more.  I typed my own tweets mainly in TweetChat though, because I am prone to forget the hashtag under the pressure of a rapidly flowing conversation.

One thing I’ve experienced is that TweetChat slows my computer after a while, even freezing me for several seconds at a time if I let it go on too long. Seems to be worst when following a very rapidly flowing conversation. Closing and reopening the web page seems to solve the problem for me. I can’t find any mention of it in a search.  Would appreciate hearing if anyone else has experienced this.

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Digital Apocalypse

Posted on 21 February 2013 by Jim

Jim Groom opened kicked down a door at the end of 2010.  DS106 was the apo kalupsis which tore away the veil that had concealed the sumptuously rich, and often darkly funny nature of digital storytelling from my perception.  Prior to yanking the covering from my eyes, video documentary was all I could imagine when I heard the term.  Lost as I was amid the ’80′s pop-culture references in the course, and even though I had to drop active participation after a few weeks, I still caught the ds106 virus badly enough to forever inoculate me against any concept of boundaries to digital stories.

Enter etmooc 2013 with a second chance.  To my great dismay, the weeks of Digital Storytelling with luminaries Jim Groom and Alan Levine conflicted with my College’s in-service, and once again I’m struggling to just skim a little cream off the minimal interaction I can afford.  Here are a couple of new ventures for me.

When I stumbled upon Dean Shareski’s “My Amazing Story of Connectedness” in a  tweet to @cogdog (Alan Levine), I surrendered to the urge to do one of my own – although I failed miserably at the challenge to complete it in 5 minutes.

I kept hearing references to Storify, so decided to give it a whirl to document my twitter goof-ups. (@AlisonSeaman suggested it’s also a six-word story: twitter learning, premature send, missed tags.) Storify lets you drag & drop selected bits from social media into a storyline.  It’s one of those low-threshold Web 2.0 apps.  I found it ridiculously easy to assemble, but that doesn’t mean I did it quickly – always gotta second-guess myself.
Last evening I attempted to export it to WordPress for this blogpost, only to discover that Storify’s export feature created and published a complete post here.
Eventually I found the embed code on Storify, so here’s my second compilation, a twitter exchange that started at the Canadian Moodle Moot.

 

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My Twitter Tottering (aka “learning”)

Posted on 20 February 2013 by Jim

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Ante Up

Posted on 21 January 2013 by Jim

This connectivism keeps messing with my time management aspirations.
Prodded by Alec Couros’ tweet referencing Kevin Stranack’s “Guerrilla Connectivism“, and inspired by Roy Beasley’s “Confessions of a MOOC Dropout“, I posted the following “Reply All” last evening in response to a college-wide email promoting Coursera’s Aboriginal Worldviews & Education:

“Would any Aurora College staff be interested in going through it together as a cohort? With our shared northern context, we could add value to our own learning by meeting for online or teleconference discussions and/or discussion forums.  Sort of build our own support structure around the free Coursera course.”

Only 24 hours later, I have four takers from four different campuses!  And that’s just from the diehards who check work email on weekends.  In the MOOC world where “massive” is measured in 3 to 6 figures, it’s a speck; in my world where two talking is a success, it’s overwhelming.  Looks like it’s time to put my money where my mouth is (no wait – “invest my time where my typing fingers have made promises” ?? – more accurate, but just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)  Once again, ideas from a MOOC launch me into an activity that takes away time I’d like to spend actively participating in the MOOC that launched me.  This time I’ll blame/credit #etmooc.  Well, I have wondered about all the hype/trash-talk about xMOOCs.  Guess I’ll see.  Aboriginal Worldview is certainly a relevant topic for me.  Maybe I’ll even have time to blog it.

Did I mention that our college President is second among the respondents?  I wonder if the domain name “connectivistevangelist” is taken… or maybe “outonalimb”.

 

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Hey! Something weird is happening

Posted on 14 January 2013 by Jim

Harry Keller* tells this story:
I once had a student come to me … and say, “I tried all of the different pendulum masses, and they all had the same period. What did I do wrong?”

To my great delight, the Adult learners in my ABE class got caught up in making the non-Euclidian planes.  (See previous posting) After some initial “We did this in Kindergarten” murmurs, I saw them begin to engage as the things took shape. They quickly recognized that the hexagons and pentagons would make a soccer ball if they kept going.  I put on my lecture hat and explained that this is a curved plane, guided them to recognize that if it is pressed flat, there is not enough material to cover the ground – there are gaps between the hexagons.  Then I asked them (deliberately misleading) to speculate whether combining the hexagons with the heptagons would make larger or smaller gaps.  They weren’t sure, some guessed larger, some smaller, and some guessed one way then changed their mind.

When they went to assemble the pieces and found there were overlaps instead of gaps, I pointed out how my question had misled by implying that there would be gaps at all.  I then asked them what kind of curve they thought they would get once they finished.  If a shape with gaps made a ball when they were brought together, would overlap make the opposite? And just what is the opposite of a ball?  Would it be like the inside of a ball?  I threw out these questions without demanding answers.  They were playing various songs from YouTube as they worked.

Suddenly D. voiced what has to be my favourite quote for the month (if not semester).  “Hey! Something weird is happening.  Look!  Is it supposed to be like this?“  The beautiful serendipity was that he was playing Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” at the time:

We don’t need no education!
We don’t need no thought control!
Teacher, leave them kids alone!

We laughed together in the joy of his discovery.  Only later did I point out the relationship of his question to the song.  It didn’t really matter what I told him was “supposed” to happen, he would free himself from thought-control by discovering the reality for himself.

*Harry Keller in a second-page comment on Edutopia post Sep 2011 http://www.edutopia.org/blog/benefits-mistakes-classroom-alina-tugend

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HEEEeeeeeerrr’s …

Posted on 14 January 2013 by Jim

Introducing myself for #etMOOC orientation week

My first project with the revamped Prezi
View at http://prezi.com/1fsnozgyimvg/who-is-jim/ if the embedded player doesn’t work.

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CMC 11 live session on Visual Communication

Posted on 3 December 2012 by Jim

I’ve created a World Clock event for the upcoming CMC 11 “Visual Communication” live session.  In case anyone else is as dyslexic about time zones as I am, click the image below to find your local time for the event:world clock 2012-12-05

or bit.ly/SCv7yS if you prefer the shortened version

See http://cdlprojects.com/post/56585 for description of the event and a link to the Blackboard Collaborate session.

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Tiling the non-Euclidian Plane

Posted on 20 November 2012 by Jim

I’ve always been intrigued by the soccer ball with its hexagons and pentagons, and with the mind-bending artwork of M.C. Escher.  The fact that the two were mathematically related totally escaped me until recently.  I do OK with basic arithmetic, but quickly get lost when they start mixing non-Roman script with the variables.  So I approached the VizMath MOOC with an expectation that I was going to be totally lost.  I am lost, but wander in amazement at the genius and the beauty.  I am not particularly worried about finding my way.

Daina Taimina’s crocheted creations are a good example.  While not even pretending to understand how these might represent (or fail to represent) the shape of the universe, they drew me in, made me believe I might copy them, if never understand them.  It wasn’t until she showed us the rough approximations of her work in hexagons though, that I found my inspiration to act – and blog.

positive vs. negative curvature

In an attempt to share some of the wonder with my ABE math students, I created a sheet of pentagons, hexagons, and heptagons to cut out and tape together.  There are enough polygons on one sheet to make a complete circle of both curved and negatively curved (hyperbolic) planes.  Extension of the planes, either to a complete sphere or complete insanity will require additional sheets, and probably collaborative effort.

download linkClick the image at the left to download a PDF version of my worksheet.

(And yes, I do know there are extra hexagons. I couldn’t bring myself to waste the white space when it’s so easy to crowd them.  Just be thankful my childhood training in frugality wasn’t so overpowering that I had to tile them.  I was tempted…)

 

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Technology Overshadows Pedagogy

Posted on 4 November 2012 by Jim

My online Tlicho Language class for government employees came out of the starting blocks over the last two weeks like snails at a sprint.  Hope it goes the distance like the proverbial turtle.  It’s sure no hare.  Struggles with technology sort of overshadow community building at this point.  Considering that part of the class is making their Skype call over a 768 kbps satellite connection, it’s actually amazing that we can do synchronous at all.

Vodburner – I’m sure that wasn’t the screen I shared

This week we all dialed into my freeConferenceCall.com to prevent losing audio.  That meant everyone had to mute their Skype microphones – but each time they got dropped, their mics were on again when I added them back to the Skype video conference.  With all this struggle with technology, I never did get around to the most important discussion about the assignments in our half-hour session.  It’s a very small class.  I intend to make phone calls to each participant before our next session to encourage them to participate in the asynchronous online environment.  I’m hoping I can walk them through the steps individually.  No one has taken an online class before.

I received encouraging support from the organizers for my philosophy that the live class sessions were for learning techniques and solving problems.  Learners are asked to select something they can use in everyday life as their first learning project and post a description to the forum.  I then work with language experts to find a culturally appropriate way of expressing this idea and make recordings or tools for practice.  Actual learning and practice is to take place in their everyday work and social lives where they are surrounded by native speakers of the language.  For the participants, it’s a change from the “taking-a-course=credentials” model they are conditioned to expect.

3 simple nouns

I created my first simple VoiceThread this week in response to one student’s posting.  It seems an ideal tool for language learning. Moodle kept erasing the embed code until Lisa Lane  reminded me to check a specific Moodle security setting.  I’ve put a screenshot in this blogpost rather than embedding it here to protect learner privacy.  My beef about VoiceThread is the same as about Wikispaces though.  No matter how open and public you make the privacy settings, no one can comment without creating an account.  That is a barrier to participation – all the more so for anyone who is unconvinced of the value of collaboration (legacy of old-style schooling where cheating was punished even more severely and painfully than being wrong – but now I’m on the soapbox).

Considering the amount of time I’m spending tweaking (and struggling with) Moodle, yes, online teaching definitely takes more time than face-to-face. Besides constantly second-guessing myself about the clarity of my instructions, I still cannot add text in our target language.

I’m in. Now where’s my database?

I’m working with Bluehost to venture into the murky world of SQL database editing.  Apparently I need to correct the Unicode settings from a command line interface.  (I’m open to anyone willing to assist me via Skype, join.me or BBCollaborate.)

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Unimaginative Title for POTCERT Week-6 Post

Posted on 15 October 2012 by Jim

I had relegated Hyper Text Markup Language old books
to the same dusty corner where my “DOS for Dummies” lay forgotten and irrelevant.  Why bother creating a web page the hard way?  I have WYSIWYG† authoring options ranging from Nightmare (MS Word) to Dreamweaver.

Then I started using WordPress and Moodle.  Formatting buttons are kind of limited there, but Hey, there’s an HTML tab where I could enter code to do more imaginative stuff, if I could remember the tags.  And it’s so nice of WP to allow a bit of formatting in comments too.  So I dusted off the old tome (figuratively speaking – literal translation=I Googled it) and found W3 School and HTML Code Tutorial – the two resources I raid when I want almost anything beyond the basic bold, underline, and italics tags.  I still can’t remember where the quotes go in img src= nor the syntax for span which replaces the font tag in version 5, but I don’t have to.  Sure, if I use them frequently enough I’ll remember; but just knowing that I can find the code goes a long way.  And understanding what it’s supposed to do allows me to play with the parameters when I copy and paste snippets I’m too lazy to type.

I usually paste the embed codes from YouTube or Vimeo into the HTML view, but I’ll try just pasting the URL into Visual view without creating a link as per the edublogs video.

Well, how about that?  Sure enough, it works!  Something new and easier.
This video from an earlier language class has a dual-purpose, hard and soft.  One can learn the names of the ten objects on the table, but it also demonstrates a learning procedure which can be adapted beyond just identifying nouns.

Now about RSS – It’s dead easy to subscribe to a tag or blog with Google Reader – “Really Simple Syndication” is an accurate name.  My problem is, when am I going to find time to read all the posts that get harvested?  My best intentions are forgotten in the flood of new stuff from the firehose.  My DS106 subscription alone has over a thousand unread posts.  Even POTCERT Subscribed a few weeks ago, shows 142 (now 139 because I got sidetracked looking at it).  Ignoring my RSS subscriptions is a choice I make, just like ignoring most of my Facebook notifications and email lists.

 

† WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzy-wig”) stands for ”What You See Is What You Get”, just another example of  disgustingly cute acronyms for unimaginative computer-speak.  It’s even in spell-check for goodness sake!  More examples of this pocket-protector vocabulary are TWAIN for Thing Without An Interesting Name,  SCSI (pronounced “scuzzy”) for the now thankfully obsolete Small Computer Serial Interface, and GUI (pronounced “gooey”) for Graphic User Interface.  Masquerading as jargon, these unsavoury characters get away with sounding acceptable when they should be marched out and shot along with all the nouns like interface, mouse, key, blog, surf, etc. that have the chutzpa to aspire to action verbs.
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