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# Quickie: new Twitter client, Tweetie, released for Mac

Monday 20 April 2009
Tagged with

- Clients
- Tweetie
- Twitter
- Quickies
- Social media

I've been playing with Twitter for a couple of months now, and I have to say, I rather like it. I've graduated from interacting with it purely through the Twitter site, and tend to use a client for most of my tweeting.

On my iPod touch, I've been using a client by the name of Tweetie from an indie developer by the name of atebits, which has loads of great features that I won't bore you with here. Today it was announced (via Twitter, of course) that the Mac version is ready for human consumption.

I've switched over to it as my primary Twitter client already and I have to say I really like it. It's still got some rough edges and it's missing some useful functionality that I liked in Nambu, but it's already showing the great attention to detail and some of the range of features that have made the iPhone/iPod touch version so good. There are already some detailed reviews up, from The Unofficial Apple Weblog and TechCrunch, so I'll leave it at that, but if you're a Mac twitterer and you haven't already, I strongly recommend you give it a try.

I'm also testing out another bit of software right now: a Mac blogging client by the name of Blogo. This is my first post using it, and I'll let you know how I get on with it.

In the meantime, how do you access Twitter? Or perhaps you dont? Leave a comment below to share your opinion.

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# Weekly links: Twitter bits

Sunday 19 April 2009
Tagged with

- Links
- Twitter
- Quickies

I often come across links that I find useful or enjoyable and that I’d like to share, but that I haven’t got time to write a full blog post about. I’ve decided, therefore, to try wrapping a few of my favourites up into a weekly(ish) digest which I’ll post here.

This week, a selection of Twitter-related links:

- HootSuite — Describing itself as "the ultimate Twitter toolbox", HootSuite lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts, have multiple users on one account (without revealing the password for that account), schedule tweets and much more.
- TwiTip — A blog filled to the brim with helpful Twitter advice and tips.
- What the Hashtag?! — A user-written encyclopaedia of hashtags: great for figuring out the meaning of that cryptic hashtag you've just found in your Twitter stream.
- 13 "Twits" Who Will Change Your Perspective on Reality — A list of Twitter users who are well worth following.
- The 10 Users You'll Meet on Twitter — A breakdown of the types of people you might run into on Twitter.
- Why I talk about the weather on Twitter — A nice, brief comment from Joanna Young of Confident Writing on joining in the conversation

You can also get an idea of what I’ve been reading and doing from:

- My Delicious bookmarks
- My Google Reader shared items
- My Twitter feed

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# Does Wikipedia have a place in education?

Monday 6 April 2009
Tagged with

- Academia
- Education
- Learning
- Social media
- Teaching
- Tools
- Wikipedia
- Wikis

Like it or loath it, people use Wikipedia. Some use it as a quick reference for unimportant matters, or as a jumping-off point for more detailed research. Some use it, inappropriately, as a source in its own right: English Heritage was recently criticised by Building Design magazine for citing a Wikipedia article as evidence in a buildings listing case. When I mentioned on Twitter recently that I was in a discussion about using wikis (though not Wikipedia itself) as an aid to research student supervision, one of my contacts replied, referring to Wikipedia as “kinda… dodgy”.

As a publicly-editable wiki, Wikipedia works by and large as a repository for human knowledge, which is great. The problem is that some of the people who edit it choose to wilfully present incorrect information. For example, the birthday of the artist Titian was recently falsified in Wikipedia following an exchange in the British House of Commons; the edit was quickly traced back to the headquarters of the Conservative Party. Other users vandalise the site, while others still are simply wrong.

What about the case in Wikipedia’s favour? Four years ago, an article (subscription required, report in Wired here) published in Nature compared 42 articles between Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. The authors reported “eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, […] four from each encyclopaedia.” In minor errors, Britannica still had the edge, but not by much.

Whichever way you fall on the issue, an understanding of Wikipedia is an important element of information literacy which cannot be ignored. As such, it needs to be considered by educators. So what are people doing already?

On the one hand, we have Prof. Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton, who bans her first year students (found via Christine Sexton’s blog post) from using Wikipedia or Google. Her aim in doing so is to force them to use and understand conventional scholarly literature so that they know what to look for in a reliable source.

On the other hand, we have Jeremy Boggs of George Mason University in America. His tactic is to have students actually contribute a well-researched article to Wikipedia, and then observe how it grows and changes over the remainder of the term. This time, the aim is to give students a direct insight into the workings of Wikipedia to inform future use.

It is this second approach that I think we, as educators, should be taking. The constructionist view of learning, which I find useful, suggests that learners will tend to stick with their existing beliefs until these are rendered untenable through experience. Since many university students have now grown up with Wikipedia, I feel that some may need to be shown the flaws in this model of publishing before they will engage with more conventional scholarly resources. Forcing them to use these resources without a reason (and “telling them” is not sufficient reason) could result in them learning simply that books are difficult to use because of the lack of search capabilities (Google Book Search notwithstanding).

And it’s not just students in school and university who need to be taught these skills. There are many professionals who don’t understand this amazingly useful resource. Either they regard it with suspicion and miss out on its benefits, or fail to understand its shortcomings and treat it as more reliable than it is. Either way, all educators must engage with Wikipedia and its flaws to ensure that our learners make the best that they can of it.

Do you actively engage with your learners about Wikipedia? What tactics do you use to help them learn to use it effectively? Or do you feel that it has no place in the classroom at all? Leave me a comment below.

By the way, if you’re interested in this debate, I can strongly recommend listening to the Digital Campus podcast, which has covered the issue right from the first episode. The most recent episode of James Clay’s e-Learning stuff podcast also covers Wikipedia in some detail.

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# Teaching with social media: engaging the audience

Wednesday 1 April 2009
Tagged with

- Blogs
- Education
- eLearning
- Learning
- Social media
- Teaching
- Technology
- Wikis

Photo by Pete Ashton

Do you like having an audience? I know I do: that’s at least part of the reason I’m writing this blog post.

The social web has greatly lowered the barrier to entry for those of us who want an online presence, and given us the greatest possible chance of reaching an appreciative audience through, for example, Google, social networking and RSS aggregation. Each one of us has a unique audience, defined by our own interests and views and how those come across in our writing, photography, music or whatever else we choose to share.

Those people who are interested in what we have to say will listen. Those who aren’t, won’t.

Now, if we want to reach more people, we can put effort into tailoring our output to their interests, marketing our stuff and generally going out to meet our audience half way. But for a personal blog or special-interest wiki, we don’t have to: we can just say what we want to say, and eventually a few people will start to read it. This is one of the things that makes social media great.

Education is not like this (and neither is business for that matter). We cannot just do what we want to do and expect it to be eventually found by those learners who can benefit from it. If students are taking your course and you’re using social media, then they’re pretty much obliged to participate: it’s common to enforce this with assessment. Because by now we’re getting used to the democratic nature of social media, it’s easy to confuse this captive audience with a genuinely interested one and assume that they will engage.

So, if we make them, they will participate. But unless they’re interested in what we have to say, they won’t be engaged, and if they’re not engaged, then their learning will be severely limited.

But fear not, for all is not lost! They’re generally taking a course (at least in HE) in which we have some expertise, so there will be at least some overlap in interests. Take advantage of social media to get rapid feedback and comments from learners; then respond to it! Thing of a blogger who you really respect: chances are that they respond quickly to comments left on their blog, learn from them and adapt to make their future posts more relevant to their readers. Why can’t this work with students too? Here are a couple of ideas that I can think of:

- If you're asking students to blog, try to leave a relevant comment or two on each student's blog to connect their views with your material;
- If your students are collaborating on a wiki, check up on it from time to time and use it to inform your lectures.

Yes, this takes effort, but so does everything that’s worth doing (although I won’t claim that that makes it worth doing). And yes, they should be hanging on your every word because you’re the expert and they’re not. But only a few of them will: the rest you have to meet halfway.

Do you use social media to engage with your students and tailor your teaching to them? Why/why not? What’s your top tip? Share your comments below.

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# Ask yourself: "What is this for?"

Monday 23 March 2009
Tagged with

- Evaluation
- Social media
- Tools

I heard an interesting anecdote a while back. I don’t know how true it is, but bear with me because it serves to illustrate a point. The story goes that when the first motion-picture camera was invented, it was intended to be used to create photographs in which the people could move, smile, wave, whatever; think wizard photos from Harry Potter. People made, sold and used these things for years before eventually, some bright spark came up with an idea: don’t just capture a single static scene, but several scenes in succession.

Suddenly, the landscape changed. This new medium wasn’t for helping you remember what Auntie Doris looked like. It could do that, but that wasn’t what it was for: it was for telling stories! And now, it’s used for teaching, disseminating information and even for two-way communication. The rest, as they say is history.

The point of the story is that when new technologies emerge, we tend to interpret them in terms of what we already know. It generally takes us a while to figure out how to use new tools that we’ve not seen before; sometimes the problem that the new tool solves doesn’t even exist yet.

So when you come across a new tool (and this applies to all walks of life, not just the web), don’t just think about it in terms of things you already know. Have a play, try a few things out, then ask yourself:

> What is this for?

Then keep asking until you’ve figured it out. Then tell everyone your idea and ask again. With any luck, your eventual answer will surprise even the clever folks who made the tool in the first place.

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# Beginners guide to Twitter Part III: cool tools

Tuesday 17 March 2009
Tagged with

- Twitter
- Tweet
- Tutorial
- Social networking
- Social media
- Howto
- Hashtags
- Clients
- URL shortening

# Time for the third part of my beginners guide to Twitter. Here's how far we've got:

1. Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching;
2. Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs;
3. Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier (this post).

Today, I’ll be making a whistle-stop tour of some of the tools and websites that can take your twittering to a whole new level. There are far too many of these to include here, so I’ll just try to give you an overview of some of the ones I’ve come across so far. As I come across more, I’ll certainly tweet about them (follow me on Twitter here) and I’ll blog in more depth about some of them too.

# Useful tools

First, an aside. One of the things that makes Twitter so powerful is its Application Programmer Interface or API. An API is a well defined standard which allows direct communication between a service, such as Twitter, and another piece of computer code. Because Twitter has a well-documented public API, anyone with the requisite know-how can write a software tool to add new capabilities. Not all of the tools we’ll be looking at today make use of the API, and you don’t need to know anything about how it works to use them, but I just wanted to mention another great design feature of Twitter.

## URL shrinking

If you’ve been using Twitter for any length of time, you’ve probably used it to pass on the URL (web address) of a web page to your network. In that case, you might have noticed that since URLs can be pretty long, you don’t get much space left to describe what it is you’re actually passing on. This is where URL shrinkers come in.

A shrunk URL

Quite simply, a URL shrinker takes your long, unwieldy URL and spits out a nice, short URL which points to the same web page. You can copy-and-paste a URL from your browser’s location bar into the URL shrinker, but most of these services will give you a bookmarklet; a link which you can drag to your browser’s bookmarks/favourites bar which becomes a button to automatically grab the URL, shrink it and copy it to the clipboard ready for use. Look this up in the online help for your URL shrinker, or look for links with titles like “Trim this”.

There are loads of URL shrinkers out there, but here’s a few that I’ve come across:

- snipr.com
- bit.ly
- is.gd
- TinyURL
- tr.im

Of these, my favourite is snipr.com because of the options it provides, but I encourage you to try a few until you find one you like.

This class of tools are, by and large, completely independent of Twitter: you can use them to shrink any URL for any reason whatsoever. For example, I’ve used them to make URLs more manageable to distribute in print, since readers will have to type these in by hand. There are a few, though, which will allow you to shrink a URL and automatically post it straight on Twitter (yes, using the Twitter API). My favourite of these is TwitThis.

## Searching, trends and hashtags

As I mentioned in the previous posts, searching and hashtags provide a great way to follow specific conversations or trends on Twitter. However, Twitter’s built-in search isn’t ideal for this, particularly if there are keywords or hashtags that you search for on a regular basis. There are a whole range of search-based websites out there which allow you to track specific words or hashtags more easily.

The first group simply provide you with an automatically-updating stream of tweets matching a specific search. Some of these allow you to save searches that you perform regularly or display several searches onscreen at once. Here are a few to try:

- TweetGrid
- TwitterFall

The second group actually allow you to interact with the conversation you’re interested in by turning the hashtag of your choice into a modern version of the old-fashioned chat rooms: they display a live log of tweets with a particular hashtag and allow you to post your own tweets which will have the hashtag in question automagically appended. These include:

- twIRC
- TweetChat

## Twitterfeed

The next tool, TwitterFeed helps to combine your online offerings: it takes any RSS feed (typically a list of blog posts or news items) and checks it on a regular basis, posting any new items automatically to Twitter. So, for example, my Twitter followers will have received a brief message with a link to this blog post, which happened completely automatically a short time after it was published.

A word of warning: it’s easy to overdo this. Some people use Twitter and Twitterfeed purely as another outlet for their blog or news site. Your view may differ, but I find this quite annoying, particularly if there’s a high volume of traffic. If I notice a user doing this, I generally subscribe to there RSS feed elsewhere if it interests me and then stop following them: I prefer to keep my news and blogs in a separate place. However, I think for low-volume, infrequent, personal blogs such as this one it’s a great way to let people know what you’ve written, as well as a legitimate answer to the question “What are you doing?”

## Twitter clients

If you’re becoming a regular Twitter user, you might be finding it a bit of a pain to log in to the Twitter website every time you want to get up to date. This is where clients come in. These bring Twitter right to your desktop in a dedicated application. Many of them incorporate features of other tools, such as URL shrinking and searching. Most of them have an option to check automatically for new tweets and pop up an alert to tell you when there’s something you haven’t read yet: make up your own mind about whether that’s good or bad! All of them, though, let you read your latest incoming tweets and post new ones. There are far too many to list them here, so after pointing out that I currently use Nambu on my laptop and Tweetie on my iPod Touch, I’ll send you in the direction of this list on the Twitter website and this more comprehensive list. Download one and give it a go.

## Analytics

If you’re really interested in that kind of thing, you might want to look at some statistics about your Twitter account and network. I won’t go into much detail on this, as I’ve not used them very much, but here are the ones I’ve come across so far:

- Twitter Grader
- Twitter Analyzer
- Twitter Counter

##

Twitter on Facebook

Other social networks

There are, of course, other social networks out there, and there are a number of ways to get them to play nicely with Twitter. There’s a Twitter app for Facebook, which allows you to tweet from within Facebook, and even offers to post each tweet as a status update in your Facebook profile. I don’t use Facebook much these days, but this is an easy way for me to keep it updated.

FriendFeed is a kind of meta-social-network. It aims to tie a number of other networks together in one place, so that you can read and post without having to visit a dozen different websites. I haven’t found it that useful yet, but give it a try.

Ping.fm is slightly different again. This one allows you to update your status, micro-blog, post full-length blog posts and save bookmarks in a huge variety of different social media websites simultaneously. It also gives you a wide variety of ways of doing this: through the website, by SMS (in the US only at the moment, I think), by email, by instant message (Jabber/GTalk, Yahoo!, MSN/Windows Live, AIM) and many more. An increasing number of Twitter clients are also supporting it, so you can transparently update your status on a number of different sites as you tweet.

## More tools

There are plenty of tools that I haven’t had space or time to mention. I’ll try to blog about some of them in the future, but for now, you might want to have a look at this wiki — there are plenty listed under Apps, plus lots more useful information about Twitter.

Have you got a favourite tool that I’ve missed? Share it by posting a comment below: it’ll be great to hear from you.

That’s it for this series. If you’ve found these posts helpful, you can find out when I write new stuff by signing up for email updates or subscribing to my RSS feed: just click on the appropriate link at the top left of this page.

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# Beginner's guide to Twitter Part II: @s, #s and RTs

Monday 16 March 2009
Tagged with

- Twitter
- Tweet
- Tutorial
- Social networking
- Social media
- Retweeting
- Message
- Howto
- Hashtags
- Web 2.0

# So, here's the second part of what's become a three-part introduction for new Twitterers. Here's where we are so far:

1. Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching (yesterday);
2. Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs (this post);
3. Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier (coming tomorrow).

Let’s get on with the second part, on some of the conventions that are commonly seen on Twitter.

# Conventions

In my previous post, I introduced you to the basic tools of the Twitter trade: messages, followers and searches. But it doesn’t end there. Since its inception, a number of conventions have sprung up which make it much more powerful, but they can be quite confusing to the beginner. You’ll probably have noticed lots of “@this” and “#that” and “RT the other”. This post attempts to explain what all these actually mean.

##

Some replies on Twitter

@replies

This is the most common convention: you can refer to another twitterer in a tweet (and by extension, it seems, anywhere else) by preceding their username with an ‘@’ sign. So in my case, that would be ‘@jezcope’. This is so common, in fact, that it’s been absorbed into Twitter itself. Each mention of @username will be turned into a link to that user’s profile page: this is a very easy way to follow new people.

An extension to this is that any tweet which begins with @username is interpreted as being a reply to something said by that user, or at least a comment aimed primarily at them. Unlike direct messages, these are still public, but are treated slightly differently by Twitter. In particular, you’ll see a link on the left-hand side of your Twitter home page: this will take you to a list showing only tweets starting ‘@yourname’. Also, if you click the reply button next to a tweet (the little curvy arrow), Twitter automatically inserts ‘@theirname’ at the start of the text box into which you type your tweets.

It’s worth paying attention to messages aimed at you in this way, because someone might be expecting a response! However, bear in mind that these messages will be visible to everyone following you, so if it looks like your conversation is likely to drag on and it’s not going to be interesting to the rest of the community, consider switching to direct messages.

## Retweeting

Another convention that you’ll come across is retweeting. Quite simply, this entails re-posting a tweet previously posted by someone else. As is the case elsewhere, it’s important to attribute tweets to their original source, and the most common way to do this is to start the tweet with ‘RT @username’, replacing username with the originator, and then copy and paste the message in afterwards. If someone says something that you think would be interesting to people in your own network, you can pass it on with minimal effort by retweeting it.

So if, for example, my pal @fred posts:

> Take a look at this really cool link

and I think it’s interesting enough to pass on to those of my followers not already following him, I would post the following message:

> RT @fred Take a look at this really cool link

Many Twitter clients (see tomorrow’s post) allow you to do this with a single click.

##

Search results for #ngtip

#hashtags

Tagging is a way of describing an item on the internet, such as a blog post, using single-word descriptions. Someone had the bright idea of tagging tweets using the form #word: it’s then trivial to find everything with this tag using Twitter search. Remember that this is just a convention, and it works simply because putting # on the start of a word makes a unique string of characters that you can search for.

The cool thing about hashtags is that if you combine them with search tools you can separate particular threads of conversation out of the vast mélange of the twitterverse. It’s quite common for a hashtag to be prearranged for tweets discussing a conference or other event; for example, the recent JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice conference used used #ngtip09 to mark discussions related to the conference. Try searching for #rednoseday to find out what people have been up to for Comic Relief. If someone’s using a hashtag you don’t recognise, try looking it up on What the hashtag?!, an online directory of hashtags.

That’s all for today. In tomorrow’s blog post, I’ll describe some useful tools for making Twitter work for you, including a few which make use of the power of hashtags.

Agree? Disagree? Leave me a comment below or contact me through Twitter at @jezcope.

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# Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching

Sunday 15 March 2009
Tagged with

- Howto
- Message
- Social media
- Social networking
- Tutorial
- Tweet
- Twitter
- Web 2.0

Twitter home page

I’ve recently signed up to Twitter. It’s not a new thing; it’s been around for a few years and it’s probably safe to say that I’m way behind the curve on this one. For those who haven’t come across it yet, it’s a very, very simple social networking site which allows you to broadcast 140-character messages. However, in spite of this simplicity, it’s a very powerful tool, and can be quite off-putting for new users.

Since I’m a bit techie and tend to pick these things up quite quickly, a few friends have suggested that I lay down some words on how to get to grips with Twitter. I’ve ended up breaking it into three to make it a bit more digestible:

1. Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching;
2. Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs;
3. Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier.

I’ll spread them out by publishing them over a period of three days. So, without further ado, here’s the first part of my guide to making this very cool tool work for you.

# How does it work?

When I said it was simple, I wasn’t kidding. Once you’ve signed up on the Twitter website, you do one of three things: send and receive messages, follow people (more on what this means in a bit), or search through the archive of old messages. That’s it. Let’s have a look at those components in more detail.

## Messages

The core of Twitter is the status update or tweet; that’s a brief message, broadcast to every other user, taking up no more than 140 characters (letters, digits, punctuation, spaces). By and large, this will be some form of answer to the question “What are you doing?” You can send as many of these as you like, whenever you like. You can even split a longer message across several tweets (manually), but if you need to do this, you might want to question whether another medium might be more appropriate.

You can also send direct messages to specific users: these are completely private one-to-one communications. If you’re having a conversation publicly with another user and it’s starting to ramble on, think about switching to direct messages to avoid subjecting everyone else to a conversation that doesn’t concern them. You can only send direct messages to users who are following you: more on what this means next.

## Followers

Wading through the tweets of every other twitterer on the planet is going to take some time. The answer to this problem is ‘following’. You’ll notice that, to begin with, your home page shows only your own tweets. No, Twitter isn’t broken: this page will only show the tweets of people you’re following.

This hands control over what you read back to you: you don’t have to follow anyone you don’t want to. I can’t emphasise enough how important this is: don’t follow anyone whose tweets aren’t worth reading. By all means follow someone for a while before you make this decision, and change your mind all you want. Just remember that if you’re not interested in updates on userxyz’s cat at 90-second intervals, no-one says you have to follow them.

Follow button

You can follow someone by visiting their profile page, which will have the form “http://twitter.com/username”. This page lists their most recent tweets, newest first. Right at the top, underneath their picture, there’s a button marked “Follow”: click this and it’ll change to a message telling you that you’re now following them. To stop following someone, click this message and it’ll reveal a “Remove” button for you to press. Twitter will send them an email when you start following them, but not when you stop.

Following info

On the left of your home page, there are links entitled “Following” and “Followers” which take you to a list of people you follow and people who follow you, respectively. On your followers list, you’ll see a tick next to anyone you’re also following, and a follow button next to anyone you’re not. Following people who follow you is good for at least three reasons:

1. It allows you to hold a conversation, and to receive direct messages from them;
2. It's a great way to build your network;
3. It's considered polite.

That said, my previous advice still stands: you don’t have to follow anyone you don’t want to.

So how do you find people to follow? You’ve got a few options here. The best way to get started is to follow people you know in real life: try searching for them. As I’ve already mentioned you can follow people who follow you. You can wade through the global list of tweets and follow people with similar interests (searching will help here: see the next section). You could have a look at the we follow directory to find people. Finally, you can explore your network by looking at your followers’ followers and so on.

It’s worth reiterating at this point that all your tweets are visible, ultimately, to anyone on the network. If you’re not happy with this, you can restrict access, which means that only your followers can read your tweets. It’ll also mean that you have to give your approval before someone can follow you. This might work for you, but openness has it’s benefits: you’ll find it a lot more people will follow you if you keep your account open. You’ll get a lot more out of Twitter if you stay open and simply avoid saying anything that you don’t want the whole world to know.

## Search

So, you’ve got to grips with sending and reading tweets, you’ve chosen a few people to follow and started to join in the global conversation that is Twitter. You’re already getting a lot out of this great tool. But what about all the tweets you’re missing?

Perhaps you represent a company and want to know who’s talking about your brand. Maybe you’re going to attend a conference and want to connect with other delegates. Maybe you just want the answer to a question and want to see if someone’s already mentioned it.

For these, and many more, problems, Twitter search is the answer. Try searching for a brand, a conference or anything else you’re interested in, and you’ll quickly and easily discover what twitterers the world over are saying about it. You might even want to follow some of them.

Well, that’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at some of the initially confusing but massively useful conventions that have grown up within Twitter: @replies, #hashtags and retweeting.

Did you find this post useful? Is there something I’ve totally missed that you think should really be in there? Perhaps you just think I’m great (well, it might happen). I want to bring you really high quality stuff, and the only way I do that is if you (yes, you with the web browser) tell me how I’m doing. Please leave a comment below or link to me from your own blog (that’ll appear here as a comment too, with a link back to you: free publicity!). I’ll do my best to respond to feedback, correct inaccuracies in the text and write more about things that interest both me and you. Finally, if you find this post useful please tell your friends and colleagues. Thanks for stopping by!

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# Social media resources for learning and teaching

Wednesday 11 March 2009
Tagged with

- eLearning
- Learning
- PCHE
- Resources
- Social media
- Teaching
- Technology
- University of Sheffield

This post is specifically intended to support my seminar given as part of the seminar of the same title, given to my colleagues on the PCHE course as part of the “Expanding your repertoire” special interest session on Wednesday 11th March 2009. I’ll give a brief description of this seminar at the end of this post. The remainder is dedicated to a partial list of some of the most popular/interesting social media tools for learning and teaching.

# What is "social media"?

Social media, Web 2.0 (and by extension, Learning 2.0) or whatever you want to call it can be pretty slippery to actually define. Here are a few starting points:

- What is Web 2.0? — Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media
- Wikipedia articles:
  - Web 2.0
  - Social media
- Some cool introductory videos from the Common Craft show

# Examples

Here are some of the most common types of social media tools currently available on the web, with examples. This is by no means a complete list, but Google should help you if you want more.

## Wikis

A wiki is a collection of web pages that can be edited in-place in the web browser by any user, with little or no knowledge of how to write conventional web pages using HTML. Most wikis allow you to restrict what it means to be a “user”, provide some standard navigational features and record the full edit history of each page. They’re great for collaboratively building a knowledge base on a particular subject, or for organising projects as a group.

- The first ever wiki
- Wikipedia — the best-known example
- Places to set up your own wiki:
  - PBwiki
  - WetPaint
  - Wikia

## Blogs

A blog (from web-log) is a website based around a series of articles, which are indexed and presented in chronological order. The articles may be as long or short as the author likes, and on any subject. Most blogging platforms provide management tools and an editor which, again, requires no knowledge of HTML. Here are some places to start your own blog:

- Wordpress
- Blogger
- Typepad
- Blogspot

## Social networking

Social networking connects people together, allowing them to share content with friends and friends-of-friends.

- Facebook — begun for university students, but now available to all
- MySpace — now popular primarily with musicians and bands
- LinkedIn — aimed at professional networking
- Twitter — centred around broadcasting of 140-character status updates, referred to as microblogging; simple and flexible

## Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking allows you to tag any page you find on the web, save a bookmark for later and share it with your connections.

- Delicious
- Magnolia
- citeulike

## Media sharing

Media sharing sites allow you to upload and share photos, videos and types of multimedia content.

- Photo sharing:
  - Flickr
  - Photobucket
- Video sharing:
  - YouTube
  - Vimeo
- Presentation sharing:
  - SlideShare

## Specific educational sites

While all of the above have educational uses and many of them provide specific services for educational users, there are a couple of websites which cater specifically to the educational community.

- Moodle — A learning management system (LMS) built on Web 2.0 principles
- Edmodo — A microblogging service (like Twitter) for education

# The seminar

The goal of the seminar was to introduce some of my fellow trainee teachers to the potential of social media for learning and teaching, and perhaps infect them with some of my enthusiasm, and also to inform them about the bluecloud project. I began by showing the wonderful video from the Common Craft Show on social media, using ice cream as a metaphor. I then gave a few examples of well-known social media tools and listed the common features, before asking those present to split into groups to come up with ideas for how they could use these new tools in their own learning, teaching or research. We then discussed these together as a whole group, and I demonstrated one way of using blogging by directing them here for further resources.

Social Media In Teaching And Learning from Jez Cope
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# Blog/career news

Friday 6 March 2009
Tagged with

- Admin

Hello loyal readers! I thought you might like to know where this blog will be going over the next few years, so I’m announcing that I’ve taken a decision to pursue a career in training and development, with a focus on e-learning. I’ll continue to blog about the bluecloud project, but I’ll also be writing about more general e-learning topics that I think you might find interesting and reflecting on my experience of making the transition to my new career. I’ve updated the about page on this site to give a bit more professional info about myself.

If you’ve got any advice for a new e-learning professional, or would like to contact me for any other reason, please leave a comment here or follow me on Twitter (@jezcope).

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