This weekend one of my friends asked me: “So what do we think about Path?”. What DO we think about Path?

I installed it about 8 weeks ago. In fact Path tells me two months and 285 moments ago. I can’t remember who originally suggested it to me. It was at the beginning of a month’s travel around Europe and I had intermittent internet access. This meant I was mainly in capture & broadcast mode (journaling my travels) rather than access & curate mode (monitoring and sharing from information streams). And Path is great for capture & broadcast.

I fell in love with  it, even though I did have to move it to the front page of my iPhone first, so I wouldn’t forget to use it, and go to one of my other services instead. Here’s 5 reasons I do so like Path.

It’s personal

I think the key reason I like Path is that it is intensely personal. Path only lets you post your personal updates. It has various artifacts you can create: a check-in, an update, a picture, a music-update, but all of those are originally created by you, based on an experience you are having. You can’t “re-Path” someone else artifacts either, so only your artifacts live in your Path.

Friends can take several different actions in response to your artifacts, they can Smile, Laugh, Gasp, Be Unhappy, or Love it, and also leave a comment, giving Path a little more finesse than just the Facebook Like or Twitter Favourite or Retweet.

You can include your friends in any update by using the “I’m With” function. This works for anyone on Path, but if your friends are not on Path, you can still include Facebook, Twitter or friends in your Contacts. Only their first name will be used.

The lack of external content, no links, no lolcats, no game updates, no witty videos, makes Path a very different and very human experience.

It’s pretty

Path got its interface right and is much more attractive to look at and to use than some of the big social media giants’ apps, like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I think this may be because Path is not trying to mimic a website. Particularly not a website that had design flaws in the first place (yes, that’s you Facebook) or a website that is contorted in adding superfluous functionalities beyond its initial function which it did exquisitely (and that’s you Twitter). Path had the freedom to design its app for a single purpose (personal broadcasting) and with mobile and gesture in mind, and that shows.

It has a cover/profile pic combination that most will recognise from the new Facebook Timeline layout, but I had Path before I switched my Wall to Timeline, and I can’t help thinking that Path is what Facebook was trying to achieve (and certainly in its mobile app, fails).

The Chooser where you go to perform an action, is just lovely, and much nicer than a row of links, blocks or buttons.

It’s packaged

Path packages several types of social media actions I regularly perform, into one platform, all started from the pretty Chooser. It also adds one update I didn’t perform but would find great if it was cross-platform.

Location update: I usually use Foursquare for this. With Path I can post a location check-in to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare and believe me, its location finder is much more robust than Foursquare. You know the “Foursquare Servers are busy” message? Hasn’t happened on Path… However the link with Foursquare is good, and so your check-ins do count.

Photography update: Path photos are very nice indeed and it comes with a good selection of remarkably effective filters (although you have to pay for others). I was using Instagram for this, and find it a pity that Path doesn’t link to Instagram, as I miss out on my Instagram community interactions. However it does allow posting to Twitter and Facebook, and when posting to Facebook, they all go into a Path album on Facebook, making the photos taggable. This is something Instragram has only recently managed and was a big bugbear for me.

Unfortunately when you send a pic to Twitter with Path it doesn’t end up in your Twitter stream of pics (via TwitPic) but just becomes a link to Path, as you can see below. A bit of a fail, that one…

Very Monty Python [pic] — path.com/p/1XdSwX

— Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) January 28, 2012

Creating Path pictures is easy and beautiful. Sharing and re-using them is not so easy. It doesn’t have an embed function on the web page. I’d love for Path pictures to go to Flickr and Instagram.

Music update: I like to share what I’m listening to and follow my friends’ music tips too. It’s how I’m introduced to new bands or genres these days, rather than radio or tv. I used to use Blip.fm but then my use was browser-based. I gave it up when it became buggy and my browser kept crashing. I then switched to Soundtracking on my iPad and iPhone, but my use was intermittent, I never built up a huge community and with my last update, it also became buggy, crashing out frequently. With the Path app I can share songs in Path, which is just with a small group, but I can widen that by choosing to share with Facebook and/or Twitter as well.

Status update: You can write a status and per status, choose to share only in Path, or to also post to one of the four linked services, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or Tumblr.

The Sleep or Awake update: This one is new for me. Basically you can set a notification in Path that your are asleep. Path posts this in your timeline, usually accompanied by the time, and sometimes an automated status update or comment, eg “Must have been a busy day” if you go to sleep early. While you are asleep you don’t get notifications from Path. How nice would it be to have a universal Sleep function that was cross-platform? You say “I’m asleep” in one platform, and all the others Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Path, WordPress and other notifications are off. I know people will say: “Why don’t you just turn off your smartphone?” but the fact is sometimes I want peace and quiet, but I do want to be reachable by txt, phone call and for my alarm clock.

The “I’m Awake” function held a bit of a surprise, as it makes for a nice communal morning experience, as you and your friends in the same city or region all wake up, particularly on work days.

It propagates

Path can propagate my updates/artifacts to one of four main services. To expand on what I wrote above. You can write a status and per status, choose to share only in Path, or to also post to one of the four linked services, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or Tumblr. This works not just for Status updates, but also for pictures, music and location updates.

I’m not a Tumblr user.  I do use the other three avidly and for overlapping but different purposes, and with overlapping but different networks. So being able to select per status which network is appropriate is great. I know there are other services that allow this, but Path makes it very easy with four tickboxes at the bottom of any  update or artifact creation page, whether that’s a regular status update, a picture, location or music update.

You can think of Path as a “feeder app” for the three sisters: Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

It’s private

When I say private, I don’t mean it’s closed. It is that too. Path itself states: “Path should be private by default. Forever. You should always be in control of your information and experience.” I’m not sure how they relate this to pictures being public on the Path website as my picture is here. But this may be a setting I haven’t found yet.

But by private, I mean intimate. That is mainly due to the relatively small uptake and who is using it in my circles. The 20 or so people I’ve connected with are all avid experienced social media users, like @haikugirloz, @playnice_nz and @daveymelb. They realise intuitively that Path is a medium and interface that can easily get flooded by too many posts. They also seem to understand that its interface calls for aesthetic, personal updates. So the photos my friends post are artful and intimate, the music they share is one song, just to indicate their current mood, the statuses they post are entertaining and personal.

And I think this last may also be Path’s downfall. It works best when used in a small network by personal friends who are all social media savvy. With no grouping (circles, lists, etc) option, you can’t structure your network into manageable streams. So if I had 450 Path friends (as I do on Facebook), the Path would be flooded and unnavigable.

It’s sad, as I love the app, but I wonder whether it will survive, or at least survive in its current pretty, personal form.

I’m really looking forward to the PLE Conference 11-13 July 2012. The conference continues to innovate in many ways. Organisationally we’ve expanded the conference to two locations, Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia and Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal, spreading the opportunity for sharing scholarship around the PLN and PLE topics and effectively making this a blended conference. How neat! (Of course, one of the venue organisers for Melbourne is yours truly  so I’m a little bias…;-))

The two locations have a joint Call for Papers out with the closing date for abstracts on 16 March 2012, and the deadline for final papers on 13 May 2012. I’m hoping to encourage you all to write an abstract, submit it and join us!

So why should you go to the PLE Conference?

I was very lucky to attend the first PLE Conference in Barcelona and some firsts are simply things which cannot be guaranteed for subsequent events. This first iteration was a veritable who’s who of networked learning with Alec Couros, Steve Wheeler, Graham Atwell, Ilona Buchem and many others in the field attending. Besides the excitement of this, it being the first conference, it also meant that much of the PLE work presented, was completely new to the other attendees. So it was like finding a treasure trove of PLE/PLN research. Also Ricardo Torres Kompen was just the best venue organiser/host, his attention to detail and calmness without peer.

So what are elements of the PLE Conference that continue to make it THE event for any networked scholar/educator to attend? Well some of us “PLE goers” have shared our experiences and reasons on this Corkboard for you to read. But I thought I would expand on my reasons below, using some of the artefacts I collected in 2010.

1. Connecting with those you are already connected with

I’m a Twitter evangelist, and an enthousiastic Facebook user. I love communicating with social media because they allow me to connect with like-minded people, people who intersect my interest niche. And I love it whenever I meet these people in real life (so much so that I’ve got a So you’re real after all! set on Flickr). Not because of the coincidence, nor the look-who-I-met factor, but because thanks to social media filtering, it is always an intense and very enjoyable occasion to meet one of these connections. We have so much to say and share with each other, and can build so much on each other’s ideas in a very short time, fueling our interests and thinking until we meet again. All of the people at the PLE Conference are of this variety. Alec Couros touches on this too in the interview I did with him.

It’s been really neat that people who have been connected over years, you yourself included, someone I haven’t had a chance to meet … Actually, you build a sense of friendship over a long time… and when you actually get to meet each other,… you can get right to the sort-of deep conversations. Because these deep conversations have been going on for a long time. That’s really the difference with the dry academic sterile type conference…When you come to a place, you can actually just get to the matter, get to the content that you’re looking for. I think that’s really quite powerful. – Alec Couros

2. This is a growing field!

Personal learning environments, personal learning networks, networked learning. It’s all very new but maturing rapidly. In his video interview Graham talks about 5 or 6 years old and PLE scholarship needing some space to come of age.

Sometimes, the discourse and the dialogue … around PLEs tends to gets lost in the big conferences, and especially tends to get lost behind educational technology, and I don’t see PLEs as being primarily about educational technology. – Graham Atwell

3. Now in the Southern Hemisphere!

@catspyjamasnz and @colwar at #ple_bcn

In 2010 Colin Warren and I (pictured here) were 2 out of maybe 6 Asia-Pacific participants. Most of the research presented was conducted in Europe, in the European context, with European funding models, in European higher education institutions. Of course, Asian, Pacific, Australian and New Zealand organisations work in different contexts, with different funding models, different education systems, policies, cultural differences, geographical differences, etc. So our uses, considerations and views of PLEs, PLNs and personalized learning will be different too. Having the PLE Conference in Melbourne, allows more people outside Europe to contribute to the body of work.

4. Anything goes

If you’re tired of traditional paper presentations, would like to try a different approach, a PLE Conference is the ideal place to mix it up . In her video interview, co-organiser of the 2010 conference Cristina Costa says:

We wanted to challenge how conferences have been done for decades.

And they did:

• In 2010 Crowdvine was used for pre-conference communication and connection building and people were posting to it even 6 months before the conference dates.
• The 2010 Twitter hashtag #PLE_BCN was coined and correctly promoted by the organisers, creating a vibrant Twitter stream which became a community of itself. That hashtag is still alive today, co-habiting with this year’s hashtag #PLEConf.
• The unKeynote of 2010 was a collaboration between Alec Couros and Graham Atwell, crowdsourcing ideas on topics and formats via Google Docs and encouraging in-room and external participation during the unKeynote
• Why should a conference be closed? Most of the 2010 sessions were streamed live from Citilab, sharing research findings and thinking straightaway, and encouraging participation, questions and comments via Twitter from inside and outside the conference. It widened the conversation and was greatly appreciated by many, although when @evilsue got involved things turned a little messy .
• The introduction of Pecha Kucha sessions allowed many participants the opportunity to present
• In 2010 (and continuing in 2011) Ilona Buchem set up The PLE Media contest, a way for participants to present their PLE work or thoughts in a 3 minute video/animation, leading to such little gems as this one describing the PLE tools in place at the TU Graz.

The conference organisers are using the successes above to inspire this year’s event, but we also have a call out for you to put your thinking caps on and devise other presentation options. Your imagination will be the limit…

5. Creativity is rewarded (and very much appreciated)

As you can see from some of the examples I gave above, creativity is rewarded and appreciated at a PLE Conference. In fact, it starts right as you walk in the door and create your own badge (or put on the one you made earlier). After all, what is more personal than how you introduce yourself to others?

And this theme of personalization and creativity runs through the whole conference. Whereas traditional conferences leave behind only a few torn paper posters, crumpled standard badges and a thick book of proceedings (most of the time only available to attendees and those who pay for access), the PLE Conference leaves in its wake a trail of open artefacts, like a rich twitter archive, YouTube and Vimeo videos, blog posts by the participants, Flickr photos documenting the event, creative slidedecks on Slideshare, and collectively taken notes in Google Docs. We look forward to seeing where you take it this year…

6. You can be on your iPhone and not be rude

@anetq at #ple_bcn

And last but not least, at a PLE Conference, everyone is like you. We are all committed to monitoring our streams, to finding those juicy tidbits, to sharing what we hear, to publicly posing our questions or comments. And so it is perfectly all right for you to whip out your iPhone, smartphone, iPad or whatever device of your choice, in the middle of a conversation. In fact, we encourage it. After all, you’re amplifying and sharing what we’re all learning about PLEs, aren’t you?

See you all in July!

In December I had the pleasure of visiting the The Hague headquarters of Shell, courtesy of @hansdezwart, their Innovation Manager for Global Learning Technologies. After a long Twitter “courtship”, we finally met IRL at Online Educa in Berlin (#oeb11) and found we indeed had lots of shared interests. One of the things I wanted to know more about was his use of Yammer to improve team connections and collaborations. I was lucky enough to have a personal demonstration and discussion, but you can read all about his Narrating Your Work project on Hans’ blog.

Sharing
As we were talking, we hit upon an activity we both do, that is not strictly part of our job but seems to have evolved naturally. We both work in roles that connect us to many different colleagues, within our teams, across our organisation, and in similar positions in other organisations. We also both have a widespread personal learning network (PLN), that is,  we are connected to many education technology experts and information sources, outside our organisation through various social media tools. The Conversation Prism diagram below created by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas demonstrates how some of those social media tools are used to ‘listen and share’.

In our discussion, Hans described how he used to send people links he had found through his PLN via email. He had now started sharing those links via Yammer, tagging all of them with a #share tag. And that triggered something for me. I’d been doing the same at EIT in my 5 years there as e-learning advisor. Monitoring my Personal Learning Network which has a heavy education technology focus, and then sharing useful, pertinent and timely resources I found through various channels. Many, many an email to a teacher was sent at 11.30pm as I hit upon a gem shared through Twitter by a colleague from Europe who was just getting to the office, along the lines of “Hey so-and-so, I think this link on yadayada might be of interest to you as we work on your blahblah course”.

All sorts of ed tech info
And it didn’t just stop with course specific information. I’d also share links on pedagogical strategies with teachers and on how higher education organisations use social media with our Marketing department. If I found an edtech link on higher management decision making for education technology, I would send it to one of our deans, or our Director of Academic & Student Services. If I found a resource on iPads in the library, I’d send it to our inestimable library manager, Diane Friis. And so on. The sharing I was doing was topic specific (education technology) but not limited to my role, or level in the organisation.

Other sharing channels
In some cases, larger projects, I was working on I would try other sharing channels and also getting the other project team members (teachers, administrative support and their managers) to contribute. For example, I’d create a Delicious tag and /or a workspace for all of us to use and share resources in. Typically this workspace would be a Moodle course for all teachers collaborating on the programme design, including a forum for sharing, or with ability for every one to add links to the course page. I wish I could say that these other sharing channels had been tremendously successful, but they weren’t. I can hypothesise several reasons:

1. these Moodle workspaces and Delicious tags just aren’t part of most teachers and academic managers’ work/life streams, and that is because
2. ‘Surfing the web’ for resources, tips and ideas is still seen as time wasting rather than time saving in most educational organisations.
3. As a consequence, most teachers and academic managers don’t have many or substantial incoming information streams, so they just don’t find that many treasures to share in turn. As a result traffic in a Moodle forum/workspace is low and so it becomes an easy stream or avenue to forget.

So I continued being a lone sharer and sharing in the stream most people do check: their email.

This is digital curation
The activity I’ve just described, that Hans and I were engaged in for our organisations, is digital curation. Us education technologists have probably been acting as digital curators for our organisations around the e-learning and education technology topics for longer than we realise. If you’re an edtech who recognises this, I would love to hear your experiences and thoughts.

• What tools have you used?
• How long have you been doing this? How long have you consciously been doing this?
• What processes have you used?
• How efficient would you say this was?
• Are your digital curation activities and results warmly received or less appreciated?
• And should this curation activity be seen as part of our role? And of other roles in the organisation?
• What would happen to your organisation if that was the case?

Many of you will be familiar with the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers which has been doing the rounds in the Moodle community since 2010. It’s been tremendously exciting for me to see the guide I released under a Creative Commons license, being used, re-used and re-developed by so many people for so many different purposes.

Why should you share an Open Educational Resource?

Besides being a staff development tool for me, the Moodle Tool Guide  has  taught me so much about what it means to be an open resource contributor. Until the MTG went viral(ish), as an ed tech I would often encourage teachers to share their resources openly. It was always a logical, practical argument around the benefit for the community. I don’t think I articulated the personal rationale for providing an open educational resource with passion.  Now I can speak from experience, when I say that sharing your teaching resources openly can:

• bring satisfaction of ‘a job well done’ when other practitioners in your field take your idea/resource and run with it,
• help someone else in your field, a colleague you may or may not know,
• bring you peer recognition within your country, internationally and sometimes even inside your institution (often a tougher nut to crack),
• provide you with external support for your ideas, processes or approaches (which may be controversial inside your institution),
• provide you with peer support, as you connect with other practitioners in your field. This is beneficial particularly if you work in isolation or are a niche expert in your institution,
• help you improve your resource, through peer review and comments,
• establish new connections with other practitioners and experts in your field,
• create new opportunities. I’ve had the privilege of being invited to a number of MoodleMoots and other conferences. that I couldn’t have attended otherwise,
• help you discover new resources and collections. You’ll be surprised at the many places your resource gets re-posted, re-tweeted and re-published,
• provide career opportunities. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been offered my current position at a large Australian university if it hadn’t been for the MTG.

Two new lessons learned

And then this week, the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers taught me two more new things. Here they are:

1. You may not have a leg to stand on…

In the first week of January my Tweetdeck column for “Moodle Tool Guide” started filling up with people mentioning it. I have this set up so I can see how the guide is being used and tweaked by the Moodle Community. I’ll usually get in touch with whoever’s been working on it. However upon following up, I noticed that in this case, it wasn’t our Moodle Tool Guide that was at the center of attention, instead it was a resource by a web conferencing company called WizIQ.

Moodle tool guide for teachers: How to interact with students online using Moodle fb.me/1r3qHFksv

— WizIQ Official (@WizIQ) January 4, 2012

Now I should be clear, WizIQ’s guide was very different. Other than the name, it was not similar to the original nor did it reuse parts of the original.

Whereas the Moodle Tool Guide is a poster-sized matrix tool assessing Moodle tool effectiveness for pedagogical aims, WizIQ’s resource was a How-to instruction manual for several Moodle tools with screenshots. But I was a little disappointed, thinking that having two documents out there with the same name, would detract from the now community-owned original Moodle Tool Guide.

The original MTG was released under a Creative Commons license, non-commercial with attribution and share-alike criteria. This protects it from someone using it for profit, or pretending authorship or ownership, but it doesn’t protect its name. Also, despite a Belgian judge ruling for Creative Commons to be legally binding in Belgium in November 2010, I’m not sure how much other legal precedent there is. So other than being a little sad at the guide losing its identity, there wasn’t a lot I could do. Or so I thought.

2. …But the crowd has your back.

And then I received this tweet from Nathan Cobb.

@catspyjamasnz I dropped a quick email to wiziq about their “Moodle tool guide” – Response included at link – bit.ly/wMu01H

— Nathan Cobb (@nathancobb) January 5, 2012

And he had. Someone in the Moodle crowd has stood up and said “Oi!”. Nathan had felt strongly enough to email WizIQ and ask if they were aware of the existence of the original. You can read Nathan’s blog post on his actions and reasons and WizIQ’s response on his blog. This is even more special if you know that I don’t know Nathan other than from Twitter. I’m not sure we’ve even ever tweeted each other directly. So I had to say thanks…

Dear @nathancobb, you’re a total trooper for taking up the Moodle Tool Guide claim w @wiziq! bit.ly/wMu01H Thank you!! #moodle

— Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) January 5, 2012

I have to say WizIQ handled the incident well and swiftly. They stated that they were unaware of the original but quickly renamed and republished their guide – you can download it as 12 Moodle tools to interact with your students online. They even changed their publishing practices to include a search for a title: “the “quick google” is now part of our publishing SOP.”

This was my first personal experience with crowd intervention, although I did follow the much more serious story of the intentional breach of Creative Commons in 2010 of Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways series. An Australian company used his CC-licensed Interesting Ways to Use iPads in the Classroom as a handout at a sales event. Read more in Violating a Creative Commons License. The Interesting Ways series has a community that consists not only of users, but of contributors. Each presentation is crowd-sourced by teachers, education technologists and other professionals sharing their tips openly and freely. This community is so widespread, that someone who knew about the Interesting Ways was bound to run into the evidence of the breach of Creative Commons.

I wonder if what we are seeing is evidence of companies with pre-21st century business practices. They don’t involve themselves in their field enough, to have an awareness of the existing community and its artifacts, yet blatantly try to interact with that community. Social media should make that easier, but unfortunately many companies and organisations still seem to be in broadcast mode.

What if you don’t have a crowd?

It did leave me wondering, what happens to your open resource when you don’t have a crowd supporting it? At Online Educa 2011, John Bohannon in his keynote Without Wikipedia and Google, I’m Stupid, mentioned that only Wikipedia articles with great interest benefit from constant improvement through crowd editing. When there is no community around a page, fallacies or disproportionate importance to one aspect of an article, can exist for a long time. I suppose the same thing applies to OER’s. If a crowd doesn’t care for them, and they don’t have widespread recognition, they could easily be subverted for profit, or put to non-crowd use. And no one would ever know. Or act.

It’s been an interesting episode, providing me with more insights for when I talk to teachers about sharing their resources openly.

If you would like to learn more about Creative Commons, I’d recommend this resource: Creative Commons, What Every Educator Needs To Know

A few weeks ago I was kindly invited by the #ConVerge11 organisers to do a digital curation workshop. First of all let me say that I’m so impressed by how well organised this conference is and how responsive to feedback. Last year they introduced Twitterwalls and this year made some minor tweaks, to further improve the very active conference backchannel. Well done eWorks and particularly the ever smiling Sarah Phillips!

This was a little nervewracking for me, as it was my first time speaking about my new topic of interest, and PhD topic: digital curation for teachers. Over the last few years I’ve presented, workshopped, taught, written and spoken a lot about the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers, Course Design and PLNs. All of these are familiar territory for me. Speaking on a new topic was both scary and exhilarating. Scary as I don’t have that much “go to” material yet, and went into the workshop more with questions and observations, than answers. Exhilarating because I met others who either are curators or are interested in curation and this led to some very stimulating conversations (thank you @jurgen @tanmac73 and @stickylearning).

I believe that digital curation will be a new activity that academics in higher education will need to adopt. What do you think? Some questions in my mind:

• What skills will academics need to be effective digital curators?
• How ready are they to adopt this activity?
• How ready are the systems in our institutions (learning management systems, hardware, software availability, etc but also institutional career progression and research systems) to support the academics in this?
• How does this fit into the concept of digital scholarship?

So I’m sharing my presentation here, in the hope to get more discussion partners on this digital curation topic.

cc licensed Flickr photo Jabba by cplbasilisk

Jetlag is wreaking havoc on my sleep patterns. So on the phone to people downunder at 5.30am, I got a tweet from my mate Steve to check out #pencilchat.

And promptly lost the next hour of my life to a highly entertaining conversation that can only happen when you mix experienced education technologists, the risk-averse environment they work in and Twitter. At one point I had tears running down my cheeks. Here are a few gems, but please, do go check the stream for yourself. It’s cathartic. And dare I say, a little pointed…

And one of my own contributions.

Well this is the first day at the eLearn 2011 conference in Hawaii. It’s a large conference with a very full program. So I thought I’d set up a CoverItLive event to try to capture as much as I can. It’s capturing tweets with the hashtag #elearnconf and #elearn11.

 

I was very pleased to be one of  a number of presenters talking about learning design at this year’s New Zealand Moodle Moot. Stephen Lowe talked about learning theories and Julian Ridden did an epic session on Game Theory which unfortunately I missed but he’s uploading an open course about it to MOOCH soon. But what was even better is that all of us were almost accosted by #mootnz11 attendees wanting to talk about this topic more. Learning design is back, baby! And it’s hot!

Below you will find the slides for my MoodleMoot New Zealand presentation with tips for the course design process, as well as our templates.

OTARA Course Design Template

Activity Sheet Template

Activity Sheet Example

cc licensed Flickr photo Zippos Circus UK 2008 by DirkJanRanzijn

Last Friday the Hawke’s Bay Tweetup (#hbtweetup) was kindly hosted by The Crossing restaurant. The lovely drinks and positively gorgeous food were enjoyed by all the Hawke’s Bay tweeps. But The Crossing offered us another benefit, a data projector, discovered a week before during my reccie. The wonderfully hospitable Richard gave us a code for the wireless and after hooking up a laptop, we had our first #hbtweetup twitterwall.

It was a little distracting at times. In fact at the start of the evening conversation was a little slower than usual as we were mesmerized by the stream, like budgies by a mirror. However, as people became used to it, it became a natural part of the evening’s interactions. Jokes were made via the wall, apologies received, contact with the outside world established with tweets coming from the rest of the Bay, other tweetups in Rotorua and Hamilton, and even from Canada and Australia (we love you too @courosa and @marksmithers).

Why have a Twitterwall at your tweetup?

Most people who attend tweetups bring their own Smartphone which will let them access Twitter via their Twitter apps. However participants have to disengage from the conversation in front of them, to check the digital conversation only available in their pocket. Projecting the Twitterstream on the wall brings the digital conversation into the room in a much more accessible form, allowing the two conversation streams to blend better.

Where else can you use a Twitterwall?

There are of course many applications for a Twitterwall, but here’s three I would encourage people to use in my own education context.

Conferences: this is where I’ve seen Twitterwalls used the most. At a conference you bring together anywhere between 100-300 experts (or even more) on a certain topic. Traditionally only 20-40 people at that conference would be heard from, the presenters. The opinions/contributions/comments/questions of the other attendees were either locked in their own notes, or maybe shared with a few of the people they spoke to at coffee or lunch. The great thing about Twitter and similar tools is that it brings those contributions out into the open, available to conference participants and the wider world in a many-to-many conversation, often referred to as the backchannel.

Lecture theatre: The backchannel function described above can easily be applied to teaching large groups. Projecting students’ tweets on a wall can stimulate discussions, illicit contributions and provide information sharing on a scale impossible in a traditional lecture. Do view the video The Twitter Experiment if you want to see how this has been put in action at the University of Texas.

Learning spaces: If you have open learning spaces in your institution, you may want to set up monitors displaying a Twitterwall, allowing learning services, librarians, IT services and others, to share information as well as students & teachers. In this way, the Twitterwall can become a support mechanism for a vibrant learning community.

What tools to use?

On Friday night we switched between four of my favourite Twitterwall tools. Most Twitterwall tools provide you with a set up screen and then allow you to go to full screen mode for use at events.

Visible Tweets: without doubt the prettiest. It displays individual tweets, which can fall into view either in a rotation motion or letter by letter, you choose. The background colour cycles softly through the colours of the rainbow. It’s good for sharing information snippets, but not so good for following a conversation. I thought it was the least intrusive of the four tools we experimented with.

Wiffiti: recently demonstrated to me by @moodleman at the Skills Tasmania conference. It shows about 6-8 random tweets at one time but reaches back about 4 hours in the stream to source them. However it does seem to show more recent tweets more often. The tweets jump into place quite nicely. And it’s easy to see the Twitter user who posted the tweet. This tool is a little better for following a conversation. You can save your wall for future use once set up. A drawback is that it displays mobile numbers that can be used for texting to it. However these don’t work in NZ. I’m not sure in which country they do work.

Twitterfountain: This tool has many settings, allowing you to customize your wall quite a bit. It’s very attractive as it rotates fullscreen pictures behind the tweets. These are sourced from Flickr or Picasa. We did try this on Friday, but none of our uploaded tagged pictures ever appeared on the wall. Tweets appear in a kind of dynamic waterfall which is appealing. However they do cycle, so it’s not a linear representation of the conversation. Also, make sure you set to speed to quite low, as it can lead to motion sickness.

Twitterfall: Probably allows for the most tailoring of the Twitter stream. Tweets can be restricted by geolocation and tweets can be excluded from the stream based on keywords. It displays tweets in a linear, chronological fashion. However, of all the tools mentioned here, Twitterfall is probably the least visually appealing.

Two others Twitterwall tools I like

Tweetwally: Has an interface that is very similar to a regular Twitter page, so recognisable for participants. This is the only Twitterwall tool I know of which shows Twitpic & Yfrog pictures in line with the tweets, making it a visual and a text-based communication tool. It also shows tweets in a linear chronological fashion making it easy to follow the conversation stream. My only hesitation would be that the tweets take up quite a bit of space on the page, meaning you see less of the conversation. You can sign in with your Twitter account and save the wall for future use.

Monitter: Is a very clean, simple looking linear Twitterwall. Tweets are displayed so quite a few fit on one page, making it easy to follow the conversation. Profile pics are large making it easy to recognise the contributors. Monitter allows the setup of several parallel columns to display several different streams on one screen. This is something the other tools don’t have. Another nice feature is the ability to restrict tweets shown based on geography.

If you have other Twitterwall tools you favour or ideas on how to use them, please share them below.

Working as an eLearning Advisor in higher education, a large part of my role is instructional design. In course design meetings with academic staff, I find myself asking the same questions over and over again. For each element of the course, I have the same questions. I thought I’d share it with you here, in an instructional design litany. (Yes I’m a geek. Used to love the Dune novels…)

The ID Litany

• What will your students do?
• How will your students know what to do?
• How will you know what they’re doing?
• How will your students learn?
• How will you know what they’re learning?
• How will your students get support?
• How will you support them?
• How will they support each other?
• How will you & your students communicate with each other?
• How will your students communicate with each other?
• How will your students learn from each other?
• Why are you using this activity?
• Why are you using this resource?
• Why are you using this technology?
• How does this activity/technology/resource relate to their current or future work, learning and life?

If you work in an educational institution where the course design phase is often skimmed or skipped entirely, you may begin the Litany against Fear now.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer…