Free webinar for educators: Microblogging in Education

Free RETA Webinar
part of the
2008-2009 eLearning with Emerging Technologies Webinar Series
Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 6:00pm MST

Keeping Connected with Edmodo, Twitter & Yammer
Microblogging in Education

presented by
yours truly (Holly Rae Bemis-Schurtz) and Cynthia S. Medina

What is this Twitter everyone's talking about? How does this pertain to me as an educator? Microblogging is here to stay, but there's no doubt it can seem strange at first. This new form of communication uses status updates to broadcast and receive information across a learning network. A microblogging community can be everything from a source of breaking information to a virtual water cooler or an 'unconference' with people around the world. Whether you want to use a microblog as a personal learning environment for yourself, with your colleagues, or even with your students, we've got the tools for you. 'Follow' us to learn about these free microblogging tools: Twitter, Yammer and Edmodo.
http://webinars.nmsu.edu/detail.cfm?id=33

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Follow @hollyrae on Twitter.

Let the web help you graph the economy

Consider using various analytic tools to find out how people are accessing your site/blog/wiki/online course and see how it can inform your blogging journey.

Finding out through Lijit that my tiny post on the social graph was causing people to land on my blog when they googled 'graph of the economy.' This lead me to do some searching myself. Let me preface this by saying that I am by no means fluent in economics...

;-)

and I would urge you to evaluate the creditability of these resources if you are wanting to 'trust' the graphs that you see.

Here's an interactive graph about inflation as of late. Interesting! I know prices keep going up but it's cool to see some stats on it.

For a more qualitative look at perspectives on the economy, you can try Twist to graph trending topics in Twitter (here's one of 'economy', 'dow,' and 'stocks').

I do fancy visualizations of various things via the internet. In doing so I happened upon




and




both of which are interesting ways to look at graphs of the economy.

I hope this was helpful if you happen to be searching for those terms. May your journeys through the interwebs be prosperous.

Fabulous Friday Following

Just a few things for you to look out for on this Friday, October 10...I'll try to help you see the forest through the trees.

MoodleMoot New Zealand 2008 just ended, but you can stream some very fresh information reported on twitter nicely via hashtag #mmnz08 (ie: what's up with Moodle 2.0, what Martin Dougiamas recommends Moodle communities should invest in, issues involving students identity management, etc). It's worth a moment of your Friday time, especially if you are a Moodle administrator. If you get especially curious and want to go more indepth, follow my shared Moodle feeds here to see aggregated Moodle tweets from throughout Twitter alongside recent blog posts by attendees.

The Twitter 20 is an effort by Jay Baer to conduct real time, '20 question' interviews of 20 influential Twitter stars. It happens this morning, follow it live, if you dare ;-). I think this would be interesting for those of us who are looking at educational possibilities of microblogging or uses of twitter for learning. I love how the format is presented...

140 character questions (x20).
140 character answers.
In real-time.
On Twitter.

I'll be with Melody and Kerry as we try to persuade folks at the Community College Roundup to try out Everybody's Business. We look forward to expanding users across campuses to widen the institutional knowledge community.

I realize these are all random weak-tie-style connections to Moodle, Twitter and Higher Ed Social Networking... maybe you'll find something here for you. If not, stay tuned. Next week I will be with some amazing colleagues at the New Mexico Technology in Education Conference and chatting up all sorts of things from Moodle to Adobe Connect to Professional Development Ecosystems to Web 2.0. And yes, there will mobile blogging and probably even a Twitter hashtag, #NMTIE08? any other suggestions?

Have an amazing-super-fabulous-glimmering Friday!

Streaming News, Emotion, Thoughts & Conversations

There's something happening which I can't describe because I don't really have the words or the schema to say it at this point.

I imagine it as this great nebulous cybernet of memes - I might venture to guess that RSS is the main technology which has allowed for us to have these amazing streams of information.

When my colleague Phillip shared the Maramushi Newsmap http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

It reminded me of these stream of conversation/consciousness/emotion sites

http://www.wefeelfine.org/ (draws from blogs in general)

http://twistori.com/ (draws from twitter)

Finding twistori led me to Summize ..I do especially like the searches for popular terms like "is down" or "listening to" or one of the coolest "#haiku"

http://summize.com/

So what exactly is happening here? ;-) I could see some cool mashup of all of the above which is designed to meet the learning needs of students...and society in general.

Collaborative writing with Twitter

I just learned about Twittories from @willrich45 of http://weblogg-ed.com/ and I'm really excited because this is the first time I've learned about a collaborative writing structure facilitated by Twitter. Please take some time and check it out in this example of a twittorie, The Darkness Inside...Too cool.

I must tell you, they say you learn something new everyday. With Twitter (especially on the @edtechtalk's friend list) it's more like you learn something new every second.

Silent 'Film'

I found this on Slideshare (which I really enjoy, btw) and it has no sound. I really don't know what Alan Levine would narrate...but there are some nice visual moments here as relates to Web x.0 and education. I also like it when slideshows are dominated by visuals rather than text. Anyhow, enough with the intro...

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P.S. Must pick up the CogDogBlog feed.