The social media response to the 2010 Canterbury Earthquake has been fascinating. I’d like to know more so I’m appealing for people to help with their experiences of social media, its usefulness, how informative it was (or not) etc, during this event. What can we learn?

If you are willing to help, please fill out the form at http://moourl.com/eqnzstudy. Thank you!

The New Zealand twitterverse is still abuzz, as people share information about the 2010 Canterbury Earthquake and its consequences.  Now, 3 days in, these tweets are increasingly about services being restored, relief offers and businesses and organisations exchanging information & aid.

Here I want to make a special mention of the University of Canterbury which has set up a special Twitter account for news about its recovery.

Also interesting to watch organisations like ASB Bank & the NZ Red Cross supporting each other through Twitter.

Most people and official news outlets are now using the hashtag #eqnz, thus consolidating the information flow. As of this afternoon it had been used 18199 times on Tuesday at 6.30pm (updated Tue 07-09-2010).

I’ve been following the use of social media in this event and reported a little about two of the hashtags that were in use in an earlier post. I’ve been RTing useful tweets with the now prevailing #eqnz tag so they get a better spread.

In this process I’ve also received a few nasty tweets and comments about what some are calling “the hashtag war”. One person commenting:

“I don’t want to extend the #eqnz vs #christchurchquake war. I think it is the most stupid bit of fussing when the world is literally falling down around us.”

When the world is falling down around you, you need a few things: water, food, shelter and…information

If you are not a regular social media user, you may well agree. However, when the world is falling down around you, you need a few things: water, food, shelter and…information.  In the early hours, many grabbed their mobile phones (closer to their beds than the battery-powered radios in their survival kits) and went to Twitter, because Twitter is all about sharing information. But to do this effectively, the information must be A. findable, B. usable and C. shareable.

A. Findable

The information that you broadcast through Twitter is publicly available on your Twitter profile page (here’s mine). However very few people will go and visit this page. Instead they will access their own home page, which displays a steady stream of the latest tweets of all the people that they are ‘following’. This stream is updated almost-live, every minute or so.

So now you find yourself in a major event, and you want your information to be findable beyond the 143 odd people that follow you.  You also want to find information from other sources than just the 156 odd people that you follow. Saturday morning at 4.35 they may not have been awake yet. Well, this is where Twitter search but more importantly, hashtags come in. By using a common hashtag (a keyword preceded by the hash symbol) and then doing a search for that hashtag, Twitter users can have a shared conversation beyond the boundaries of their usual Twitter network.

In the case of an event like this, it is impossible to  have a pre-agreed hashtag as people do for eg conferences (see ULearn10 in Christchurch this week). So instead you monitor the wider Twitter stream for a while, doing several searches, until you find common hashtags. In the initial stages you may use 2 or more hashtags, but once a dominant hashtag emerges, it is essential that you use this. If you are the provider of crucial information, eg NZ Civil Defence or a news channel, using the common hashtag is how your tweets will be findable.

B. Usable

The information you broadcast, your tweets, must be usable.  The 140 character limit of a tweet is its strength but also its weakness. For your tweet to be usable in a crisis, it must be immediately informative in those few characters. If you want to share more, then link to a place where the rest of the information can be found. Links can become quite long (not desirable in a tweet) so you use a ‘url shortener‘ to make them an acceptable length (abt 20 characters). Most Twitter applications will do this automatically. If you do make use of links, then also make sure your tweet is an accurate description of what people will find when they click on that link. In a crisis, you don’t want to be wasting anyone’s time.

Informative #eqnz tweet by @siobhanbulfin:

One of the less usable tweets coming from the NZ Civil Defence Twitter account:

C. Shareable

In the case of a major event the information needs to flow, it needs to spread. So you design your tweets to be easily shared. How do you do this?

• Don’t take up too much space with Twitter functionality such as your username. Of course during the event it’s too late to change your name, but if you are about to open a twitter account then consider this: @minedunz would have been 5 characters shorter than @mineducationnz.
• Use the shorter hashtag. Of course you will be driven by the prevailing hashtag, but if you get in early, then encourage the use of the shorter option.
• Use short sentences. It helps to write in the active voice, leaving out definite articles (such as ‘the’) and prefaces eg ‘Cracks in windows.’ rather than ‘There are cracks appearing in the windows”.
• Aim to make your tweet a re-tweetable length when the hashtag is included. The formula for this is: 140 characters – your twittername characters – 4. How does that work? Well 140 characters is standard length for a tweet, but when it’s retweeted, it will include the following: RT @twittername. So that would be 14 characters. However you may want to make it shorter yet to give retweeters some room to add their comments. Often done by adding eg “<- important!” or “<- wow!”. 100 characters is probably a very good length for a tweet in a crisis event to keep it shareable.

So that’s what we can keep in mind for the next earthquake or volcanic eruption, whichever comes first here in New Zealand: we should try to keep our information on Twitter findable, usable & shareable.

With the earthquake in Christchurch yesterday morning, Twitter has become an important source of information, aid, support & humour. And its not just pointless babble (as an aside: the qualification of pointless babble was refuted by the excellent Danah Boyd). Here’s some of  the things people are sharing through their tweets:

• pictures of damage
• videos of the quakes and of damage
• checking in with friends, family & whanau
• reactions & commiseration on the aftershocks, the loss of electricity, the loss of property, the cold
• information on safety eg turn off your gas & power mains
• links to information from the seismic drums at Geonet
• links to news articles (both New Zealand and around the world)
• information about road closures and the curfew last night
• links to public information, eg how to claim for damages with the Earth Quake Commision or which schools are closed on Monday

And the twitterstream is not just being fed by people living in the region, but from across New Zealand and beyond. With all this it can become quite hard to track all this earthquake information or get an overview of it.

So here’s a short demonstration of how I’ve been monitoring the earthquake twitterstream. Hope you find it useful.

Note: most Twitter clients have a version available for smart phones. It’s much easier than tweeting by txting.

After helping organise a staff development day about 21st C Learning (more about that later), I find myself musing on the link between feedback and encouragement as reciprocal actions.

This was a day with mixed ability and experience staff, all encouraged to take the next step up on their education technology skills ladder. They did this in groups, led by a colleague who is more experienced.

Usually what happens with these ‘traditional-style’ staff development sessions is that a survey is sent the next week to staff (the ‘happy sheets‘). Did you find this useful? That’s interesting but not as interesting as asking again 6 weeks later, are you still using your newly acquired skills? If not, why not? If yes, how else can we help you?

Now a little red cynical me, popped up on my shoulder, and said: “of course they will not still be using it in 6 weeks”. There’s rivalling priorities (research, clinical placements, marking) and suddenly what was claimed today to be a timesaver (Moodle quizzes, Flip videos), seems like just too much work.

But then I thought, wait a minute, that is my responsibility too. How can I encourage and support them over the next 6 weeks, so they will continue to use these skills?

My preference would be to run staff development through networked learning. Inducting staff into an education technology network of like-minded colleagues, would make on-going encouragement and support easy. But this is not a part of our institution (yet – give me time ).

So in traditional staff development situations (one day, 2 days, a 2-hour workshop), how do I deal with my side of the bargain? If participants are expected to continue using a newly acquired skill and give me feedback on my workshop/my work, then my side is to provide active encouragement & support (more than just being on the end of a phone or email). But being realistic about my available time too, as only e-learning advisor in an institution of 350 staff.

Options to keep my side of the bargain within current institution structures:

• Use the newly set up Faculty community page to provide links to examples and instruction videos
• Send weekly emails to the group with interesting education technology and 21st C learning news
• Send 3 surveys for feedback, 1 next week, 1 in 6 weeks, 1 at end of the year. These need to be informative & snappy, but not happy sheets
• Encourage the staff with more education technology experience to share examples of their work on the Faculty community page
• Run virtual debates via the Faculty community page. Some valid questions and worries were posed today about use of social media in education. This conversation can be continued
• Ask faculty managers to take active role in encouraging continued ed tech use (through above mentioned methods).

Any other suggestions?

Last week Friday I started a fun little Twitter event called Tour de Moodle. Interested in seeing other people’s Moodle setups, layouts and themes, I asked people to share a link to their Moodle homepage.

Tour de Moodle tweetout

I thought it would be a perfect end-of-year activity, but last weekend was embarrasingly quiet (cue: tumbleweeds). However, after a week the Tour de Moodle now seems to be getting a little traction (thanks to @adzebill, @moodleman, @moodlerific, @dafyddhumphreys and @joseph_thibault).

You can see the stops the Tour de Moodle has made so far at What the Hashtag (my favourite twitter archiver at the moment): http://wthashtag.com/Tourdemoodle

Participating is easy, just send out a tweet including:

• a link to your organisation’s Moodle homepage
• the hashtag #tourdemoodle
• the hashtag #moodle
• optional: “Pls share yr Moodle too”

Looking forward to watching your Moodles race by! Currently the yellow jersey holder is @kineoopensource.

I love serendipitous learning. This week I followed the ASCILITE Conference held in Auckland on Twitter (am still kicking myself for not being there). There’s many thoughts, links & ideas I need to follow up on with regards to education technology in higher education. But what I love about  the powered up information exchange between people who share a passion that builds around an event like this, is the accidental or perhaps offhand tips that get shared that otherwise you’d never find out about.

An example of this today was a Twitter exchange between James Clay & Mark Smithers. Although they were discussing the role of IT departments in higher education, in passing James suggested that Mark install WPTouch for Wordpress so his blog would render better on an iPhone.

I hadn’t optimised my blog yet so decided to install WPTouch as well. It took me about 5 seconds to install and it makes my site look just shiny on the iPhone. Thanks James!

Over the next few months I will be testing an iPhone for work. They’ve asked me to make a project out of it, so I’ll blog about issues & opportunities I encounter in iPhone use here. This is now my first post for this project – check!

The leading thinkers on Open Education gathered in Vancouver last week for the OpenEd09 conference.  It was a sight & sound to behold – an open storm. Ustreams, Flickr pics and a Twitter avalanche, meant many of us around the world felt part of the event, as virtual attendees. (I got up at 4am in New Zealand on Saturday, to watch the Friday keynote at 9am Vancouver time.)

Social media are such an extension of conferences and events. Pre-social media we used to hear from the 15-20 selected speakers at a conference. And probably about the bunions of the man you were unfortunate enough to sit down next to at lunch and were unable to ditch. Now we can hear from everyone at the conference, and select those we want to hear more from. For 6 days, the #opened09 column in my Tweetdeck dispensed precious ideas & information. I began following new people, feverishly bookmarking urls and favouriting tweets for follow-up.

my #opened09 fav tweets in Tweetdeck

And that’s where I hit a snag – the tweets.

1. My favourite tweets don’t make much sense without the context of the other tweets. And unfortunately, the Twitter search is ephemeral and will not let you retrieve those later. It’ll let you set extensive date parameters, but these don’t give you the desired results.  This was a harsh lesson from  the EDUCAUSE Australasia conference in Perth this year, which was one of the first well-tweeted events I attended. We lost a lot of witty and valuable tweets…

2. And a more academic problem -  some #opened09 tweets are such gems, I’ll likely want to quote and re-quote them. How do I give credit where credit is due and correctly reference a tweet?

But then I came across Gunther Eysenbach How to cite twitter, how to cite tweets, how to archive tweets which solves both problems. In it he gives a detailed how-to of the WebCite service which not only gives you the correct reference for a website, but perhaps more importantly, also creates a permanent archive for that site. And it works for tweets too.

So I can reference and archive Scott Leslie’s individual tweet like this:

A favourite opened09 tweet by Scott Leslie

Leslie, Scott. Twitter / Scott Leslie: are you supposed to get ch… . 2009-08-18. URL:http://twitter.com/sleslie/statuses/3310928225. Accessed: 2009-08-18. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/5j7I0nnKZ)

or the entire Twitter stream for the #opened09 hashtag like this:

[Multiple Authors]. #opened09 – Twitter Search. . 2009-08-18. URL:http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23opened09. Accessed: 2009-08-18. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/5j79icRhc)

These archived tweets are now static at WebCite so they can be referred to and retrieved. Of course, that was 2 hours ago. The #opened09-ers go on. Even as I’ve been writing this post, the Twitter search tab is showing 7 new results ’since you started searching’…

This is a post about teaching teachers tools. I know, I know, of course the adoption of educational technology should be driven by possible enhancements in teaching & learning, not by the ’shininess’ of new tools. But in my experience, there is a group of teachers for who certain tools can work like a gateway drug:  e-learning gateway tools.

If you are a technology integrator, e-learning trainer, ed tech staff developer, pay attention:  introducing these gateway tools can give you some ‘easy wins’ – even better, these teachers can become your most ardent e-learning champions.

Not everyone’s a geek

For those of us who consider ourselves ‘connected’, trialling a new tool or technology comes as natural as breathing. Here are just 2 likely scenarios:

1. We know the learning activity we want to create. We find one or several tools that will facilitate that activity. These are tools we already know, or discover through our PLN. We test them and pick the one best suited to achieve our learning need.
2. We encounter a tool, again probably through our PLN, and consider how it can be used in a learning activity. We then either create the activity or store it for future reference.

This week several colleagues and Kim Cofino’s Tips for Technology Integrators post reminded me off the realism of our workplace. Newsflash: not everyone’s a geek like us.

About 65% of of my role as e-learning advisor is e-learning staff development (including pedagogy, Moodle training, instructional design, really everything but the kitchen sink).  Very rarely do I get to work with the innovators & early adopters – those who will play, experiment, tinker, and make tools do cartwheels to see how they can be used for teaching & learning . I chat to them over morning coffee (and via Twitter, Facebook and their blogs), but they don’t need my support. I tend to work with academic staff, managers and allied staff,  in the early & late majority.

A graph of Everett Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle model. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

The Understandably Cynical

In my experience, there is a subset of teachers in that early/late majority category, that we can call the Understandably Cynical.

1. They are committed to their students’ learning experience,
2. They are satisfied with their current teaching approach but do experiment with new techniques,
3. Their computer & digital literacy is low to medium,
4. The addition of technology in their daily work mix , eg email, has not made their work easier or faster,
5. Their time is precious, split between teaching, research and a life,
6. They perceive time spent online establishing social networks or  ‘playing’ with new tools, as wasted,
7. They don’t want to burden students with new tools unnecessarily,
8. They appreciate their privacy.

In short, they are great teachers, whatever they are doing is already working, they’re open to new ideas, they’re busy and past experiences with technology have been a hindrance, not a benefit to them.  They are Understandably Cynical.

For this group of teachers, I’ve found that providing them with gateway tools can start them adding the use of technology to their teaching arsenal.

What are gateway tools?

Gateway tools are like gateway drugs – they open the door to the serious stuff.

Characteristics of an e-learning gateway tool:

1. Solves a problem (eg size or access)
2. Builds on existing collections
3. Saves time
4. Is easy to use
5. Is immediately useful in the classroom
6. Has passive social functionality
7. Can be the start of a teacher’s PLN – although the previous characteristics may fire a teacher’s engine, this is the turbo boost.

Examples of gateway tools

Here are two examples of gateway tools, Slideshare & Delicious.

Slideshare:

1. Solves a problem – makes PowerPoint files smaller and easily accessible from anywhere, freeing a teacher from the localised shared drive.

2. Builds on existing collections – you can use PowerPoints files you already have.

3. Saves time – a search on Slideshare can provide you with inspiration for your own lecture or lesson, or even provide you with a complete lesson structure.

4. Is easy to use – to make use of Slideshare resources, takes no more than simple search skills. Uploading your own resources is akin to attaching a file to an email.

5. Is immediately useful in the classroom – once a presentation is uploaded, it can be accessed in the classroom during the lesson and remains available for access & download for students later.

6. Has passive social functionality – unlike some other Web2.0/social media tools, Slideshare does not require you to be socially active,  invest in building a network or give out too much personal information, for it to be useful.

7. Can be the start of a teacher’s PLN – although Slideshare does not require social activity, it will expose teachers to other teachers/experts who share their interest. Those friend requests can be hard to deny…

Delicious:

1. Solves a problem (eg size or access) – many people still save their bookmarks in the browser on their computer. This means when you leave your desk to go teach in a classroom, you don’t have access to those bookmarks. Storing bookmarks online lets you use them wherever you have internet access.

2. Builds on existing collections – it’s easy to import your existing bookmarks into delicious.
3. Saves time – using delicious & it’s useful tags & description function, can really speed up how fast you can refind ‘that one’ site. No more roaming through endless folders. Install the delicious buttons and bookmark new sites with one click.

4. Is easy to use – as stated, the delicious buttons turn it into a 1-click system. And to make use of other people’s bookmarks, takes no more than simple search skills.

5. Is immediately useful in the classroom – you now have all your bookmarks in not just one classroom, but in every room you teach in. And that makes you a lot more flexible. A student asks a question? Mmm, I’m sure I bookmarked a site that had an interesting take on that…

6. Has passive social functionality – like Slideshare, Delicious does not require you to be socially active, invest in building a network or give out too much personal information, for it to be useful. You can’t even upload a profile picture.

7. Can be the start of a teacher’s PLN – again, although Delicious does not require social activity, you can’t help but run into useful resources shared by its many users. And once you find a user who shares links about your interests, you may want to find out what else they are sharing, on their blog, on Twitter, or elsewhere…

I’ve had moderate success introducing teachers to the tools above. If you have had success introducing teachers or colleagues to other e-learning gateway tools, I’d love to hear about it.

I’ve just transferred my blog from Edublogs to this new location. The last post on the old blog was about Twitter Mosaic. Unfortunately the mosaic was a. broken and b. hopelessly out of date. So yes I’m re-hashing an old post, but it’s for a reason.

A Twitter Mosaic is easy to create. Just type your Twitter username, choose between Twitter Followers or Twitter Friends and the site creates a mosaic out of their avatars. You can then edit it, removing those you don’t want (you may follow @BBCNews but it’s not really your friend, is it?) and your mosaic is done.

You can copy & past the code to embed it in a website. But of course, the clever people at Twitter Mosaic are also willing to print it on cards, mugs, bags, mouse pads and t-shirts.

I will admit I am sorely tempted by the mug so I could take my PLN to morning tea with me. (Obviously with only my tablet pc and my iPhone, I don’t come across as nearly geeky enough in the staff room). However last time I checked it came down to NZ$60 incl shipping. Apparently printing anything Twitter-related on anything, is still good business.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Friday evening, Project Runway on tv, lappie on the couch. Time to play.

Had some fun with Wordle. After playing with TweetStats yesterday, wanted to get those tags and use them in Wordle. Unfortunately they weren’t weighted. So result is a bit bland but still fun.

Wordle is set up to link with del.icio.us and because it does weight those tags, the result is much more impressive!

Embedding in a blog post requires a little editing of embed code – need to take out all the spaces.

Could be used to introduce a topic in class? As result of a discussion thread?