Twitter and Voicethread

October 19th, 2010 by Jan

Today we started with using Twitter and Voicethread. Both could be used at school level (Roleplay, creative writing etc.).

However, there is the issue of access. Not all students want to create an account or have a mobile device to access Twitter. They could use their mobile phones, but then there is the question of costs.

Voicethread seems to be a very useful device. Especially since it is quite easy to embed it into moodle:

Po co komu Twitter?

June 14th, 2010 by Ilona Buchem

Ostatnio Joanna zapytała mnie, dlaczego właściwie tweetuję (= używam Twittera). Kilka innych osób też zadało mi to pytanie, więc myślę, że jest to temat ciekawy dla wielu, szczególnie tych nie-tweetujących. Oto zapis naszej rozmowy:

Joanna: Wiem, że zawzięcie tweetujesz. Kiedyś napisałaś, że czytasz nowe Tweety jeszcze przed poranną kawą… Co takiego daje ci Twitter?  Na czym polega  jego „czar“? Pytam oczywiście pod kątem procesu uczenia się, bo rozumiem, że informacja o tym że ktoś właśnie idzie na kawę niekoniecznie wzbogaca cię naukowo. Twitter jest na pewno szybkim zródłem informacji, ale czesto jest to informacja z drugiej reki, w dodatku podana w telegraficznym skrócie, a nie każdy jest urodzonym sprawozdawcą, czy reporterem. Szybkie zródło informacji niekoniecznie oznacza dobre i rzetelne zródło informacji….

Ilona: Właśnie z Twitterem jest odwrotnie! Jest świetnym zródłem informacji – zarówno z pierwszej ręki (np. Tweety na temat konferencji PLE) jak i z drugiej ręki (np. Re-Tweety (RT), czyli informacje przez kogoś już ocenione jako wartościowe i dlatego przekazane dalej). Ale masz rację, Twitter jest mieszanką przeróżnych typów informacji i ważne jest, aby umieć filtrowac to, co jest subjektywnie ważne, interesujące itd. Chociaż to, co jest ważne i interesujące może się dosyć często zmieniać. Ja na przykład mam takie momenty, kiedy jestem tylko ukierunkowana na odbiór informacji fachowych i ignoruję Tweety, które donoszą o sprawach osobistych. Jednak czasami właśnie te osobiste Tweety są dla mnie bardzo ważne i cieszę się, że mogę w ten sposób być w kontakcie z ludzmi na innych płaszczyznach niż poziom zawodowy. Twitter to taka mieszanka publiczności i prywatności. I to właśnie jest w nim ciekawe. Każdego dnia możesz znaleść na Twitterze coś, co cię zainspiruje, ucieszy albo skłoni do myślenia, albo podsunie ci prosto „pod nos“ informację, której szukałaś już od dawna.

Joanna: Czyli, kiedy wchodzisz na Twittera to z góry wiesz po co?

Ilona: Czasami wiem, czasami nie. Najczęściej po prostu idę z falą i odkrywam w tym potoku informacji jakieś nowe wzory. Dam ci przyklad. Jakiś czas temu zapomnialam zupełnie, że miała być w TV transmisja z Eurowizji, a bardzo chciałam ją w tym roku zobaczyć, bo Niemcy mieli przesympatyczną kandydatkę (Lenę), ktróra nota bene wygrała.  Było już póżno i zaczełam szukać w Internecie, czy Lena już miała występ. Nie mogłam znalezć nic aktualnego, ani przez Google, ani przez strony programów TV. No i myślałam, że już przegapiłam. Wysłałam więc przez Twittera zapytanie, jak dała sobie radę Lena. W ciągu kilku sekund dostałam na tego Tweeta (wiadomość na Twitterze) kilka odpowiedzi! Okazało się, że wystep był jeszcze przed nami. Przez te Tweety odkryłam hasło tzw. taga #eurovision, za pomocą którego mogłam prześledzić wszystko to, co do tej pory zostało na Twitterze napisane na temat Eurowizji. Okazało się, że ludzie tweetowali już od kilku dobrych godzin na ten temat –  komentowali, co się dzieje, kto ma jakie szanse, kto miał dobry występ itp. Było też wiele dowcipnych Tweetów – przy kilku naprawdę śmiałam się do rozpuku!  Za pomocą Taga #eurovision zaczełam uszestniczyć w tym globalnym tweetowaniu  – komentowałam, odpowiadałam, re-tweetowałam. To była super zabawa! Jak wiesz, transmisje Eurowizji nie są najlepszą rozrywką pod słońcem, ale przez Twittera uczestniczyłam w bardzo fajnej globalnej party. To tak, jakby moi znajomi byli u mnie i razem komentowalibyśmy to, co się dzieje w TV. Było wesoło i miło spędziłam czas. Gdyby nie Twitter, to pewnie wyłączyłabym TV po 5 minutach. A tak, bez wychodzenia z domu byłam częścia społecznego, interaktywnego wydarzenia. Teraz coś podobnego dzieje się w związku z mistrzostwami świata w piłce nożnej … polecam hasło #worldcup!

Joanna: Czy umiesz ocenić ile czasu dziennie poświecasz tweetowaniu? Jakby tak zebrać te sekundy, minuty razem?

Ilona: Cieżko powiedzieć. Czasami pół godziny dziennie, czasami 15 minut, czasami 5 minut. Ale prawie codziennie wchodzę i patrzę co się dzieje, o czym się dyskutuje.

Joanna: Czy zamiast np. czytać tweety o konferencji albo z konferencji, nie lepiej jest na niej być? Albo w tym czasie przeczytać artykuł z dobrego czasopisma naukowego?

Ilona: Tak, dobrze być na konferencji, ale nie możesz być na wszystkich i zawsze. Dlatego jeżeli coś cię bardzo interesuje, a nie masz czasu godzinami śledzić livestreamów, możesz sobie taką kwintesencję przeczytać właśnie na Twitterze. Na podstawie Tweetów dowiadujesz się wtedy, jakie były najważniesze tematy, co ludzi poruszyło i o czym sie mówiło. A jeżeli to cię dalej interesuje, na pewno znajdziesz też pośród Tweetow linka na bloga, gdzie będziesz mogła poczytać więcej … Ale zapomniałyśmy w naszej rozmowie o najważniejszym aspekcie Tweetera – o ludziach, którzy są jego częścią. Porozmawiajmy następnym razem na ten temat pod kątem PLN – Personal Learning Networks …

Barcampy

February 12th, 2010 by Ilona Buchem

W zeszłym tygodniu byłam na nietypowej konferencji, na educampie w Hamburgu, ktróry jest formą barcampu. BarCampy, podobnie jak mówi Wikipedia (apropos: ktoś powinien zaktualizować ten artykuł ;-)) to otwarte i interaktywne spotkania dotyczące określonych tematów. Takie nietypowe konferencje nazywane są też „nie-konferensjami“. Chodzi w nich o to, aby w przeciwieństwie do tradycyjnych konferencji, które są sztywne i nudne, umożliwić uczestnikom aktywne branie udziału i  współstwarzanie konferencji.

Są m.in. politcampy dotyczące spraw politycznych,  socialcampy, dotyczace tematów socjanych, bibcampy dla bibliotekarzy, foocampy dla hackerów, musiccampy, genercampy, artcampy, gamecampy, photocampy no i są też educampy związane z edukacją.

Celem takich barcampów jest wymiana doświadczeń i pomysłów, dyskusje i prezentacje  w otwartej i nieformalnej atmosferze. Program barcampu układają zwykle sami uczestnicy, tzn. podczas barcampu każdy może zaproponować jakiś temat i jeżeli znajdzie wystarczająco dużo uczestników, zorganizować sesję. Educamp w Hamburgu połączył jednak takie demokratyczne układanie programu z zaplanowaną dyskusją, do której zaproszeni zostali znani i raczej „tradycyjni“ profesorowie. W barcampach uczestniczą przeważnie bardzo różni ludzie, zacząwszy od profesorów, poprzez managerów, pracowników firm, naukowców, nauczycieli do studentów i uczni. I własnie o to chodzi w barcampach. Chodzi o to, aby taka heterogeniczna mieszanka mogła spojrzeć na interesujące ją tematy i problemy z  różnych perspektyw i przez to znaleść nowe drogi, nowe metody, nowe pomysły itd. Na barcampach uczestnicy używają chętnie twittera.  Tweety wyświetla na twitterwall (ekranie). Twittuje się na różne sposoby, można coś komentować, wyrażać swoje zdanie, zadawać pytanie itd. Przez to praktycznie każdy uczestnik ma możliwość aktywnie się udzielać i wpływać na rozwój sytuacji. No i do tego jest dobra zabawa 🙂

A co słychać na temat barcampów w Polsce? Znalazłam właśnie stronę na której wymienione są spotkania barcampowe w Polsce. Mam wrażenie, że wiekszość tych barcampów dotyczy tematów informatycznych lub biznesowych. Np. ogólnopolski barcamp skierowany był do startup’ów internetowych.

Czy barcampy to zmiana paradygmatu?

Twitter & Flickr in 5 Minutes

February 25th, 2009 by Cristina Costa

I thoroughly enjoyed today’s session as part of Buth’s workshop. There were very though provoking questions there! It is great to connect to new people all the time…it’s just brilliant to be challenged by people’s ideas and experiences. It makes me think, it helps me reflect, and most important it helps me see things from someone else’s eyes.
Now that is what I call a great learning experience.

I have been thinking about what someone in the room said. I have written about this before too and I do understand where she (sorry didn’t get the participant’s name! ) was coming from.
We, the enthusiastic about everything that involves pushing a button, has a plug and enables interaction, sometimes come across as evangelists, or at least as people who think technology is the answer for all our problems, when, in matter a fact, that is not what we think and neither what we believe in.
But the fact is that there was, there has been, and probably there will always be really good and also really bad teaching. [my best teacher was my 3rd grade teacher…in such a poor school that we didn’t even have a phone… wonder if that would be possible today…?].

But as I was saying… Technology is not everything…it’s not even that much to be honest, but it can be something that can help us reach out to a wider world, simultaneously widen the classroom and make it closer to the world…
Technology is about bridging connections, open new communication channels, enable collaboration at a larger scale and situate the learning activity in environments and spaces as never possible before.

For me, technology is only useful if it enables me to enable my students with the opportunity to efficiently and effectively learn in a more realistic context. After all, learning has never been limited to the classroom walls…how many of us have not advised our students to travel in order to get closer to the reality, the culture and the language they are studying? How many of us haven’t made meaningful experiences outside the official learning place and schedule? And how many of us didn’t wish we had more opportunities to do so? Oh well… technology provide us with new ways of traveling, of making new experiences, and of transforming our practice and approach at the push of a button. Of course, it is not the push of the button that really matters, but rather where we allow that button (that channel) to take us to…

Times are changing, and the change changes us too.
Like I once said, my grandfather used to ride a donkey, my father had a motorbike, but soon realized that a car was better for him. These days I spend a lot of hours on airplanes to reach the places where I have to be. We live in a changing world! We need to adapt to continue to be relevant, to provide students with more opportunities… I wonder what the future awaits us, but I am sure my offspring will be experiencing many different channels I haven’t dreamed of yet… maybe because they are still not part of my reality, hence embedded in my habits and part of my needs.

Here is the presentation I attempted to give yesterday. It was developed in collaboration with Carla Arena

Feel free to contact us. we love to connect! 😉

Post origianlly posted here.

Are you twittering this?

June 26th, 2008 by Cristina Costa

Probably not… 🙂
However, twittering (links to) blog posts is only one of the many ways in which twitter has served me in the last months.

Twitter, a micro-blogging free online tool, has become incredibly popular among web users in the last few months. It has also entered the educational world and it is surprisingly bringing people together over 140 character messages. Is it a case to say less is more? Or is it just the way we have become?
The most amazing fact yet is not really the size of the messages, but how it enables information to flow and the narrative to grow. And oh boy, does it do so.

I must say I was a really bit sceptic about it at the beginning. I always am. I am never an early adopter. It takes time for me to get into things. It’s just a reflection of who I am, I guess. Rather than my finding the tool, I need the tool to find me [if this makes any sense at all…]. I will explain….
I can’t even remember when I first created my twitter account, but I do remember thinking about why I should have one. It was too limitative for someone like me who has very little synthesis capacity. It would just take me ages to write a 140 character message, and I wasn’t sure I was going to get much out of it. Furthermore, not many of my online friends were in twitter…yet! I immediately put twitter in my have-an-account-but-not-using-it-tool shelf. And it remained there for a while until Carla Arena and the Blogging 4 Educators team spiced up my curiosity about it once again.They were twittering and I started following them.I was fascinated by the amount of relevant information, bits of personal insights and also some trivial tweets that were arriving at my desktop in a twinkling of an eye. It was fun and most times relevant. I started seeing the point of it. Twitter had finally been able to reach out to me – or better said – the people who were using it. And so I decided to give it another try. I shyly started twittering, hoping no one would notice me (what could I actually offer in a 140 character message?). To my surprise, I started getting more used to it (you need to create online twitter habits!!). I got better at short messages. I have to use “short-cuts” most times – not very scholastic, but it does the trick!! 😉 I also started communicating with others via twitter. I noticed that there were also people who actually read my messages, as I was getting some @me tweets too. It is interesting how people communicate directly and indirectly with others by sharing links, responding to questions, providing additional insights and sometimes even guiding in alternative directions, which they also find useful. All of a sudden micro-communication was increasingly entering my world. Because I started following more people, more twitters also decided to follow me – I still haven’t figured out how selective people are about who they follow, but I have ended up even following some of those who my twitter-fellows follow because of the tweet-conversations they are following (confusing, ha?).  In this sense twitter has enabled me to enlarge my connections and networks [even if in a rather lurking way, as I tend to communicate, not exclusively, but more often with those who I already knew from other venues]. Micro-blogging has largely contributed to my learning.

There is of course many questions that arise from this new practice and means of communication, sharing, networking…learning. Yes, Learning. That no one can deny! Many of the hot issues around twitter relate to the literacy theme. Are we becoming lazy at writing? Will this type of discourse ill-influence our essays? Will it give little-johnny bad writing habits? Are we destroying the language?, etc.

Well, I don’t think so. I believe that in learning everything counts. We don’t learn only from the most sophisticated prose [I am even tempted to say that it is where it has less chances to happen, although it can help refine it]. We don’t speak the way we write, and we obviously won’t be using a twitter register when applying for a job, for instance, although you might get to know about your future job through twitter!!
Different contexts call for different registers. It has always been like this, I don’t think it’s going to change now.  So, I have a hard time understanding why we should be so concerned or see it as an evil practice which will ruin the kids’ writing capacity.

Okay, I am being quite ironic now, but the fact is that in our daily lives we all express ourselves differently from the way we develop an academic speech, for example. By the same token we adopt different speech tones according to our target audience.
It doesn’t mean however that we don’t gain something from all the different situations we get involved in. We just have to be flexible and understand the differences of the several contexts in which we have a presence. Twitter is just one more application to add to the panoply of others means of micro and instant communication which make us reinvent the way we get our ideas across and interact. Through sms, instant message and now twitter a new language register (or a sub-set of it) has emerged – it’s a pure reflection of the immediacy of such channels. Preventing learners from using such environments is a lost battle. They are using it already. They have started doing so way before we did. It’s a dialect they master and which they enjoy.It belongs to their generations.Hence, there’s a certain magic in it.
I truly believe it can be accommodated as part of the teaching and learning experience. It has great potential, and some educators are already doing so, as it has recently been reported here.

More about group twitter note taking soon!

Twemes and Lifestream learning

June 5th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

I greatly enjoyed the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Regardless of the formal sessions, what makes the conference is the people and the settings.
ON tuesday we organised an unconference session on the terrace of the conference centre. Or rather we did not organise it. In the best tradition of unconferencing it emerged or just happened. Anyway, the outcome was that Steve ‘Wiki’ wheeler, mobile Mark Kramer. Andreas the podcast Auswarter and a bunch of friends spent two and a half hours discussing the future of technology enhanced learning. The discussion embraced the meaning of mobility and mobile learning, motivation, informal learning, the future of education institutions, deschooling society, web 3.0, MUVEs, emotional learning and more. And thanks to a veritable plethora of recording devices edited highlights of our conversations will be released soon, I am sure.
Much of the discussion centred on mobile learning and, in particular, mico blogging. We were all intrigued by the success of our tweme at the Edumedia conference. The tweme (the word tweme is a mashup of twitter meme) was not an official conference initiative and all that had been done to publicise or explain it was a quick announcement prior to my keynote presentation on the first afternoon of the conference. Yet, despite the very limited bandwidth, a lively community and discourse emerged – see www.twemes.com/edublog08
I am increasingly intrigued by microblogging formats as a way of capturing the incidental learning which happens all the time. Incidental learning is heavily context specific and os based on social interactions.
Incidental learning is episodic but rapid and frequent. Our learning and knowledge base is constantly redrawn, challenged ro adjusted to take account of an on-going stream of incidental learning episodes. This might best be called Lifestream Learning. And twitter and other such microblogging formats offer a compelling way of both capturing and representing such a learning Lifestream. Even more, twitter allows us to express the emotions which as so intrinsically involved in incidental learning in social contexts.
Of course there is a danger of being overwhelmed by a river of data. We need further tools and approaches to filter, search and aggregate our learning life streams. Still more we need tools to assist us in representing such learning, of visualising our knowledge and of combining our own knowledge representations with those of others.
We do not have such tools at the moment (I sort of feel it should be something like the matrix). But being able to capture and represent a community shared lifestream such as Edumedia – even if it was just for two days and we will never experience the precise context again.

Do you Twit?

May 19th, 2008 by Cristina Costa

It’s been a while since I last posted here. I kinda miss it.

Today seems a good day to post, especially because I have decided to take part of one more challenge: this time is twitter and I was wondering if you were interested in twittering or at least checking what it is going on there. The challenge page can be seen here and basically it all comes down to one thing: Twitter fun!

Let me tell you how I got so into twitter. I always start off being very suspicious and quite reluctant about the new fashionable tools to which you get invited almost on a daily basis. Twitter didn’t appeal that much to me at the beginning – I am never an early adopter… Embarassed it seem to be quite vague and ineffective… to be honest …and so after signing up to one more account I didn’t give it much thought. However, during the preparation of the earth day event it became extremely useful as a way to get to know the other members of the project a little bit better. Along the way I started getting more and more involved in it as people were sharing resources, expressing opinions, talking a little bit more about what they were doing at that exact moment (how it is raining again, and Hurray … the football team scored again! – those little things that make daily life more bearable and also make you wear a smile on your face as you think to yourself…it’s not only me who has all this paper work to take care of!) Nothing like experiencing in context! Cool

Then with diigo offering the possibility to twitter your bookmarks away and igoogle allowing me to add my twitter friends’ feeds to my home page, twitter has become part of my daily wanders in cyberspace. I got convinced about its potential. Finally!

I have linked to so many useful resources my twitter friends have twittered about, I have followed other interesting people who otherwise I would probably not have come across, and I have benefited loads from what other people bother to share. The twitter-land is indeed a GREAT micro-world.

The learning with computers community has recognized that and is now promoting the Microblogging challenge. I hope you can join us! 😉

More info about twitter can be found here.

Text originally posted here.

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