Read all about it

I started this blog very tentatively back in April 2008 (read the very first post) deciding to try out blogging just to see what would happen. Since then it has become a way of life and I now spend rather a lot of my spare time writing three blogs as well as looking after a couple of web sites and various social networks. Throw in Twitter and Facebook and it all adds up to a fairly large digital footprint. The fun thing about it all is that one thing leads to another and the channels of communication multiply almost automatically.

My daily news on Paper.li

Today there are some excellent applications that can compile impressive web sites around your everyday communication. If you have a reasonably sized Twitter network you can make a daily newspaper based on your daily Twitter feed using Paper.li . It simply selects the most popular tweets from your followers each day and expands them into a newspaper format. Very attractive and involves virtually no work for me, apart from maintaining a good Twitter network of people who provide good content. See my daily news summary. I don't know how many people check my news site but it gives me the highlights from my Twitter network without even needing to log on to Twitter. The content is chosen by people I follow and I follow people who provide good links and valuable information.

This tool can be easily used with classes or projects. A group of students or a project group can start a Twitter account and follow key experts and bloggers in the chosen field. Paper-li will then compile this feed into a daily newspaper that monitors the subject being studied and gives students instant access to hundreds of relevant articles and new ideas.

My Scoop.it site, Corridor of Learning

I've just started a very interesting service called Scoop.it. It provides a plug-in button on my toolbar and when I see an intersting article or news item I simply press the Scoop.it button and the article shows up on my own site which I decided to call the Corridor of Learning. On this site you can see what I've been reading recently and it links directly to those articles. I use this as a silo of potential blog material, handily presented on one page. I can quickly select an interesting article and put it on my Scoop.it site for reading in detail later. Some of it I will use for blog posts here and some will appear on my Swedish blog Flexspan (there's a translation widget there if you don't speak Swedish).

My site is just a reflection of my own reading but Scoop.it can also be used to great effect in the classroom. A Scoop.it site can have several contributors so a group of students could co-curate a site, adding relevant items from day to day and providing a visually attractive bibliography for their assignment. A new feature allows you to search for and link up with other users who curate similar sites to your own as this new video shows.



As I wrote earlier, once you get started on this you just can't stop and your network and involvement just keep on growing. And I haven't even mentioned Google+!!