CIT@IUPUI.edu

Embracing the Twitter Classroom

It’s my experience as a post-secondary educator that students don’t “get” Twitter and for that matter, they don’t get much beyond Facebook! To me, that’s a good enough reason to show them Twitter and other tools for teaching and learning so that they will realize that there is so much MORE available to help them learn than the time that they might “waste” on Facebook where I spend much less time anymore.

I like Twitter for discovery and because of that, I now use it IN PLACE OF my RSS reader because I depend on the Twitter “crowd” to tell me what’s important because I need some way of figuring out what deserves my ATTENTION since I can’t keep up with all of the RSS feeds that I would want to read. Twitter is important because it has fostered an ECOSYSTEM that now offers a rich array of services whose POTENTIAL for teaching and learning that we are just beginning to understand and appreciate!

My own experiment with Twitter in a class was conducted during the previous semester at http://cit499.info Although it was only moderately successful, I learned enough from the experience to try again next semester and I now know better what to do (and NOT to do) in order to improve the experience. Read more at Mark Krynsky’s blog at http://bit.ly/cit499lifestreamblog which explains WHY it’s important for students to “get” social media for personal branding to get an advantage in job-hunting.

A new "version" of the course lifestream

I was trying out the new beta of FriendFeed and may have stumbled on something.

I created a “list” (still NOT exactly sure what that means) for CIT 499. Then, I noticed that Diigo bookmarks that appear in the Friendfeed list include the comments that were originally posted in the Diigo bookmark. That is pretty cool because it gives more context and meaning to entries in the course lifestream.

Click here for this new version of the course lifestream which I will also post to the course page. This is promising!

CIT 499 now has a mobile site (work-in-progress)

I have characterized CIT 499 as a “Web 2.0” course because not only does it teach Web 2.0 as subject matter, but it also uses Web 2.0 for delivery. As such, it demonstrates that one can deliver a course essentially with Web 2.0 services withOUT needing a learning management system (or course management system)! The CIT 499 course page is the current version of this demonstration.

One of the emerging technologies discussed in CIT 499 is mobility and it “dawned on me” yesterday that the course didN’T have a “mobile-friendly” version of the course page so I turned to MY FAVORITE site for creating “mobile-friendly” sites: Winksite. I “played around” a little and this is what I came up with.

Not being willing to “leave well enough alone” I decided to re-direct http://m.cit499.info to the Winksite. I “meant well” but that’s probably where I created some problems as I’ll describe later.

Wanting to “show off” my new creation, I sought feedback from @davidharper (founder of Winksite), @jeffsonstein (faculty member at RIT), @grigs (founder of Mobile Portland), and @palmsolo (of MobileTechRoundup and ZDNet) who I respect as mobility “gurus” and I just realized that I overlooked @toddogas (MobileViews Blog).

Early this morning, I first heard from David who pointed out that the way that I was re-directing to http://m.cit499.info (using GoDaddy) was causing the Winksite to be displayed inside of frames that were created by GoDaddy. Needless to say, this concerned David because it made Winksite look “bad” which is what Jeff started to point out without realizing what I had done.

To “make a long story short” with David’s help, I have “fixed” http://m.cit499.info so that it now displays without frames. There are a few other fixes that Winksite will make to improve the user experience, but I think that we now have a good start on a “mobile-friendly” site for CIT 499.

In the meantime, I have also heard from @dberube of MoFuse so let’s “wait and see” what he has to offer.

I’m having so much “fun”…aren’t you?

We're being "noticed"

Mark Krynsky, a leading proponent of lifestreaming, just posted about our course in his blog. He characterized CIT 499 as the “First College Course on Lifestreaming” which is probably true, but it’s ironic because it hasN’T been MY intent that lifestreaming be the focus of the course. He did “pick up” that the students are being graded on their lifestreams.

He also characterized the course as ‘about helping guide students to use social media and other services to help build a “personal brand”’ Those who were in CIT 310 last year would recognize that I was then trying to help students to build their “personal brand” through their electronic portfolios.

This course uses social media, especially Twitter, much more aggressively! That “tweetstream” has certainly been the “best AND worst” thing to happen to the course lifestream as previous posts have documented.

Recent developments have moved me to broaden my view of the “course lifestream” as a way to document learning. As an assessment tool, the course lifestream is certainly a valuable artifact because it documents the learning PROCESS rather than merely the outcomes! Furthermore, the notion of a lifestream can be applied not only to any form of learning, but to any activity in one’s LIFE! I suspect that this notion will eventually help us to justify what many see as merely a result of personal vanity.

In the meantime, I will concentrate on learning in whatever way that happens. For example, I am only now becoming aware of one’s “personal learning network” (PLN) so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the relevance of lifestreams to PLNs.

I’d like to start calling them “learnstream” or “learning stream” BUT a Google search reveals that those terms are already “taken” so I’ll let that go for now.

Addition to course lifestream

Since we’re seeing some “life” in the CIT 499 blog in the form of comments, I realized that I had neglected to include the RSS feed of the comments in the course lifestream. That has now been remedied.

Is there "noise" in the course lifestream?

In order to “breathe life” into the CIT 499 “organism”, I have created a course lifestream by using Friendfeed. However, I have been concerned that this lifestream contains entries that are NOT relevant to the course. Especially since it includes entries from the lifestreams of the students enrolled in the course, it is conceivable that some of the students’ posts are not necessarily relevant to the course because their (personal) lifestreams encompass activities outside the scope of the course. Twitter is most likely to be the source of such posts due to the “impromptu” nature of tweets. For the time being, we are trying to remedy this problem by creating lifestreams that do not include their tweetstreams from Twitter. Then, we are using Twitter search to filter tweets with the #cit499 hashtag to include Twitter in our course lifestream with “relevant” tweets. Let’s “wait and see” how this works out.