Farewell Twitter - breaking up is hard to do

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

It looks like it is time to leave the sinking ship of the app formerly known as Twitter after almost 15 years of tweeting. Elon Musk, looking and behaving more and more like a classic James Bond villain, has succeeded in destroying a major social media channel in one year of chaotic ownership. His strategy seems to be to scare off all serious users and create a new platform, X, for right wing extremism, conspiracy theories and disinformation. In that case he has succeeded. 

However, I'm sad to leave because over the years I have made so many valuable connections on Twitter that have lead to collaboration and new friendships, as well as countless useful links, inspirational chats and moral support. I've met people on Twitter who I have then met at conferences, written articles with and formed projects with. It took me a few years of work to build up a network on Twitter. Many colleagues gave up with it because they had so few connections and didn't work out how to attract more. There was little or no interest in the platform here in Sweden back then so I reached out internationally, following educators I knew and admired and then checking who they followed. That way I built up a network of trusted sources. Then I had to find ways of getting people to follow me otherwise I'd be simply tweeting into a vacuum. I focused on sharing useful content (articles, news, threads) and using hashtags to reach as many as possible. Slowly people started following me and connections began to happen. I followed people and channels who offered useful content for my work and assumed that some of themwould find me a useful contact. I also started using Twitter to generate traffic to my blogs and that certainly helped them thrive. I remember the day one of my educational gurus retweeted one of my blog posts and I saw the sudden peak in page views - I really felt I'd made the big time! That has happened quite often since then but I still get a great feeling when a major name in my field notices what I've done. No names mentioned but I thank you all. 

I have made many exciting contacts and one in particular still makes me smile. I saw a tweet one day from a school teacher in Canada  who had seen a nice Swedish brochure about using Creative Commons licenses in school. She wondered if anyone could translate it to English. I happened to know the person who wrote the original and we very quickly created a new English version and sent it to the Canadian teacher. This then spread and was used in many schools. I then got an invitation from the teacher to meet her class on Skype one afternoon and talk about Creative Commons as well as answering the pupils' questions about life in Sweden. All that because I answered a tweet.

Then there have been all the tweetchats. I have taken part in many of these and organised many too. If you have never tried one before it goes like this. You announce a chat session in advance and a suitable hashtag. At the proposed time you send a tweet with the hashtag welcoming everyone to the tweetchat. Participants "tune in" by searching for the hashtag on Twitter or whatever app you use for it. The participants can then introduce themselves and you can make a few welcoming remarks and repeat the chat rules. The key is that the hashtag must appear on every post. Then you ask a question and wait for responses. As the answers come in you can comment on them and encourage participants to comment on each others' posts. You keep feeding the discussion until the time is up, usually after one hour. It's rather chaotic - some people find it stressful and confusing whilst others thrive. I love hosting but you end up typing almost non-stop for an hour. If you have experienced users the chat just flies along and participants share links, ideas and new perspectives. I will miss this and even if the same thing can be done on other platforms I don't really have the energy to start all over again.

As Twitter implodes into a platform called X it is time for the world's media, institutions, companies and leaders to leave and stop using it as a channel for serious dissemination and discussion. I hope that world politics will no longer be conducted on X. I'm not sure where they should move to though. Do we really trust Meta's new Threads? Is Mastodon able to become a default news source? Or is the new social media landscape too fragmented? Twitter has been an extremely powerful medium for 15 years and it is hard to understand how it could be destroyed so quickly.

Curiously, I have never really seen the dark side of Twitter. Maybe it's due to a combination of being careful who I follow and the algorithms being very effective at feeding me content that I want to see. Anyway, my feed has always been full of education content as well as increasing amounts of climate research and humanitarian posts with almost no trace of the toxic garbage that have made the platform so infamous, especially since Musk turned off all the safety controls. I'm still reluctant to completely switch off because I still get good useful content from both contacts and trusted news media. I've deleted Twitter from my mobile but haven't quite pressed the button to completely exit. Breaking up is hard to do.

PS. I have now deleted my account.

My farewell to on-site conferences - at least as a university employee

Session in the EDEN conference (CC BY Alastair Creelman)

I have just returned home from the last educational conferences of my professional career. I am retiring this summer and any conferences after that will either have to be by invitation or if I feel rich enough to pay it all privately (unlikely). I attended NU2022 in Stockholm, a Swedish national conference on pedagogical development in higher education, and EDEN's (European Distance and E-learning Network) annual conference in Tallinn, Estonia. My next post will discuss some of the issues raised at these conferences but here I will just make some general comments.

I must admit that although I have spent the last few years organising, hosting and participating in many online conferences and meetings, the chance to finally attend an on-site event was very welcome. It was wonderful to meet colleagues, mingle, nibble snacks and do a bit of sightseeing in the evenings. A reminder of days gone by and a nice way to round off my days of university employment. 

One theme I would like to comment on here is that of the role of the online participants and their use of the back channels. Both conferences were billed as hybrid with live streaming of many sessions and the option of a Q&A function or chat to interact with the on-site audience. In the Stockholm conference there were hybrid parallel sessions and although the production was fine there was virtually no input from the online participants. In my two sessions I tried to encourage questions and comments in the chat but sadly nothing came. At EDEN there was a Q&A function in the streaming platform that was used quite often but there was no room for discussion between participants. One interesting feature of the EDEN conference was the inclusion of sessions held exclusively on Zoom. Here, on-site participants, including presenters, had to find a quiet corner to sit in to take part in these sessions so that they were fully online and therefore avoided the risk of the on-site participants dominating the discussion. I did not participate in the Zoom sessions at EDEN but I am sure they were more interactive than the hybrid sessions because everyone was online and had access to chat and microphone. Maybe the conclusion is that the focus in hybrid sessions is almost always on the on-site event and the online participants do not see themselves as full participants. If you really want the online participants to be active then offer fully online sessions.

Both conferences had hashtags for Twitter but only a few participants took advantage of this to share ideas and links. I have always enjoyed the Twitter feeds at conferences because I get so many good reflections and interaction with other participants. It's also great to see non-conference people getting involved, thus widening the reach of the conference. I use Twitter to write reflections, links and quotes and then refer to the feed when I write about the conference later. The next post will do just that. It's sad that the Twitter discussions this time were a bit limited. Are people tired of back channels in general or of Twitter in particular or are people just reluctant to share their ideas?

Then there is the sustainability of on-site conferences. I firmly believe that we cannot continue holding large-scale international on-site conferences if we want to have any environmental credibility, given that most people have to fly to attend. Maybe justifiable if the majority of participants can travel by land. I travelled to Estonia by train and boat but I strongly suspect that the carbon emissions of today's giant ferries may even be higher than travelling by plane. I have not dared to investigate this.

I will try to keep up with future conferences by online participation unless something remarkable happens. But I thoroughly enjoyed this final fling.

Part 2 of this post will follow in the next few days.

Non-commercial social networking - a safe haven in a world of insecurity and surveillance?

"Storm" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Derwisz

With so many of our social media tools controlled by multi-billionaires and thriving on our personal data, it's no surprise to find that more and more people are opting out. In the wake of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter there has been a significant rise in subscriptions to Mastodon, the non-profit open source alternative. This week, the European Union's European Data Protection Supervisor announced the pilot testing of two new platforms, EU Voice and EU Video, that are open source and meet the data privacy conditions set down by GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the Schrems II ruling (EDPS launches pilot phase of two social media platforms). They are based on existing non-commercial social platforms, PeerTube and Mastodon, and are now being pilot tested by a number of EU agencies. Wojciech Wiewiórowski, EDPS, makes the case for this initiative:

With the pilot launch of EU Voice and EU Video, we aim to offer alternative social media platforms that prioritise individuals and their rights to privacy and data protection. In concrete terms this means, for example, that EU Voice and EU Video do not rely on transfers of personal data to countries outside the European Union and the European Economic Area; there are no advertisements on the platforms; and there is no profiling of individuals that may use the platforms. These measures, amongst others, give individuals the choice on and control over how their personal data is used.

I hope this initiative succeeds. I love social media but find the present set-up increasingly distasteful and long for the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of networking without commercial exploitation. 

In addition there is now a growing number of open source social platforms that are interconnected under the banner of Fediverse. This means that if you belong to one platform you can interact with members of other platforms seamlessly even if you are not a member of the other platforms. Similar to using e-mail or good old telephony; you can contact anyone thanks to common standards. The video below explains the concept quite nicely.

Here's a film about PeerTube, offering a safe alternative to YouTube and Vimeo for posting video material.

Of course these communities are dwarfed by the commercial giants but maybe, just maybe, the tide could be turning as more people realise that you can be social without accepting tracking, profiling and exploitation. The idea of interconnected communities is so obvious that I wonder how we have been duped into accepting the commercial walled gardens as normal. I wish I could say that I have moved my digital activities over to Fediverse, but the fact is that I have so many valuable contacts, groups and communities that are only on Facebook, Twitter etc and don't want to lose them. My contacts on Mastodon number only a handful compared to Twitter. I also wonder if people really want security and protection and that the attraction of the commercial platforms is that absolutely everything and everyone is there, from the sublime to the ridiculous and beyond. Don't underestimate the thrill and fascination generated by all the insane  photos and film clips available on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, even the vitriolic comments that follow. Maybe it's the crazy stuff that keeps us scrolling. Will we be equally fascinated by a nicely organised and clean version, no matter how secure and respectful it may be?

 Of course I welcome an alternative to the insanity and surveillance but although it may only become a niche phenomenon, it's a vital safe haven for those of us who need to find a safer and more respectful part of the internet to live in. I don't see the giants being felled any time soon by the power of open source, but's what's important is showing that there are other ways of organising how we communicate on the internet and that big tech is not the only solution. 

New Twitter guide for educators

Photo: David Truss, with permission

Twitter is still a tricky tool to introduce to teachers. Sadly their general impression of Twitter is negative, associating it with fake news, trolls, celebrity trivia and toxic political mud-slinging. Creating an account means flinging yourself into the gladiatorial arena and opening yourself to attacks from all sorts of monsters. Persuading understandably skeptical colleagues that Twitter can also be used to create a valuable professional network and even community of practice is definitely not easy.

Twitter isn't an easy tool to adopt and the rewards are long rather than short term; basically you need a critical mass before the benefits become obvious. You need to follow people and people need to follow you and until you build up a network you'll be tweeting into the wind and no-one will know you exist. Like all forms of network building it takes time, patience and a lot of trial and error. That's why you need a clear reason for using Twitter and most importantly you need the help and encouragement of an experienced user.

If you're curious enough to give Twitter a chance and you want learn how to get started in a systematic and informed way then I can recommend a very practical guide in the form of a free e-book written by David Truss, Twitter EDU - Your One-Stop-All-You-Need-To-Know-Guide to Twitter. This book can be downloaded to your laptop, tablet or mobile in a number of formats and takes you through all the basics of using Twitter, essential rules of Twitter netiquette, finding people to follow and building an educational network. To get the most out of the guide you should create a Twitter account before you start and then you learn to tweet by tweeting for real. The guide can save you a lot of time, effort and despair since it focuses on good practice, respect for others, giving credit and responsible networking. You also get tips on how to spot and avoid typical spammers and time-wasters. Even if you are an experienced user like me, you can benefit from a quick browse through the guide.

One small line of wisdom explains why attitude is so important for success with Twitter, or any digital tool for that matter:

“If you think Twitter is ‘dumb’ or ‘a waste of time’, well then it will be.”

Although Twitter is certainly full of highly toxic and dangerous rubbish you can easily avoid it by following trusted colleagues and communities. My own feed is almost exclusively about education and every day I find links and ideas that are extremely useful in my work. I've also made friends and valuable contacts through Twitter and have met some of them in person. As David points out in the book you need to view your Twitter feed as a never-ending stream of information that you dip into now and then rather than trying to read everything; as your feed grows you very quickly realise the impossibility of this approach. Dip in a few times a day and see what's floating by just now. Forget what went past in the time you were away, what you don't see you don't miss.

But the real key to success with Twitter is engagement. To get something out you have to contribute. If you show that you provide useful information, ideas and tips then people will follow you. If you show your appreciation for the information you receive your reputation will grow and you will widen your network. Actually the normal principles of human communication apply in digital spaces, contrary to the common myth that digital communication is somehow virtual, cyber or not real life. Being kind and respectful pays off, even in Twitter!

Twitter as a tool for discussion

  by wildxplorer on Flickr

I have been an enthusiastic user of Twitter for almost 6 years now and use it mostly as a channel for sharing links to interesting articles and news in educational technology. I have a wonderful network of people I follow who provide me with useful links and ideas every day and often provide answers to questions I ask. Twitter is used in many ways and although my focus is on sharing interesting content it can also be used for discussions in the form of a Tweetchat. I have either lead or participated in many Tweetchat sessions, especially in recent weeks on an open course I'm helping to facilitate, and I thought I could share some experience and reflections.

So if you're planning to arrange a Tweetchat here are some points to consider:

• Marketing. Spread the date and time of the session several times during the week before and make it clear that the session lasts for a certain time (generally one hour). The amount of publicity depends on how wide you want your audience to be, if it's just for one class then you won't need to spread the word any wider.
• Preparation. I create a Word document and write all my questions for the chat in advance as well as other predictable messages like welcoming everyone to the chat and thanking everyone for an interesting discussion. I also have a list of interesting links to relevant articles, tools or suchlike in case I need to provide them during the chat. This saves a lot of keyboard bashing during the chat. Each message includes of course the relevant hashtag. 
• Pre-chat instructions. Record a short screencast showing how to participate in a Twitter chat and post it well in advance. Then people know what to expect and how to participate.
• Welcoming. As moderator I welcome everyone to the chat session and ask everyone to say hello. This is useful because then you know roughly how many active members you have in the chat. Good to know that someone is out there!
• Questions. Normally the format is a series of questions that the moderator introduces every 10-15 minutes. To show which is which you write Q1, Q2, Q3 etc. Keep them short and sweet - Twitter's in-built 140 character limit forces you to be concise. Some organisers try to get the participants to answer using A1, A2, A3 etc but that seldom works in my experience unless you have a remarkably disciplined group. Normally people forget to even write which question they are answering so it can be hard to a logical discussion flow.
• Hashtag. Without the hashtag the tweet disappears out into the deep blue yonder, only seen by those who actually follow the sender. Many good comments disappear this way so it's essential to remind everyone to remember the hashtag. If I follow that person or they are replying to one of my tweets it will show up in my personal feed. In that case I will retweet it with the hashtag so everyone sees the comment.
• Socialising. As a moderator I try to give positive feedback to good comments as often as possible and participants soon do likewise. It's also nice to see them retweeting particularly good comments on to their own networks. Once this is happening more people will be alerted to the discussion and it's fun to see external participants with no connection to the core group joining the discussion. Good to explain in the preparation material that this can happen. 
• Embracing chaos. Chatting on Twitter is fast and furious; once you get going you seldom have a quiet moment. You'll get answers to Q1 when everyone else is discussing Q3 and there'll be plenty of retweets of earlier contributions. The flow of tweets is seldom particularly logical no matter how careful you organise. This can be confusing for newcomers and many find it frustrating to be forced to discus complex issues in 140 characters. However I find the challenge of being brief is rewarding once you accept the limitations.  
• Time up. When the time is up thank everyone for their contributions and step away. If some want to continue that's up to them but it's best to end exactly on time than dragging on too long. Most participants are amazed when you say the hour is up.
• Follow-up. You can save and even edit the whole session on Storify, including flipping the flow order and starting from the first tweet. This enables others to read through the session with a little more logic than in the raw version.

Here are some more articles with tips on Tweetchats:
The Ultimate Guide To Hosting A Tweet Chat (Steve Cooper, Forbes, 2013)

How to Participate in a Tweet Chat (Janet Fouts)

Wisdom of the crowd or rage of the mob?

  by floodllama

A recurring theme in the media is the abusive tone of so many online arenas and the destructive power of trolls. We've all seen how online discussions can turn nasty and I have withdrawn from many when the trolls take over. A BBC article, Twitter and the poisoning of online debate, looks at recent abuses on Twitter and worries that real discussion is being forced away from the public arena.

And there is wider concern about the future of online debate. Where now are the places that reasonable people can go to find discussion that does not quickly descend into abuse and flame wars? Anonymity is undoubtedly a vital defence for vulnerable people under oppressive regimes - but it has also allowed others to express themselves in language they would never think of using face to face with their targets. This kind of behaviour rapidly has a kind of malign network effect - once forums become occupied by noisy sweary folks, more reasonable voices quietly depart.

I think the main issue here is management. There are many excellent discussions on the net completely free from insults and abuse but you need active managers as well as a community spirit to quickly extinguish any flames that may occur and this means warning and then removing abusive users whenever they overstep the mark. An online discussion must have a set of basic rules and by signing up you agree to abide by them. When an arena gets as massive as Twitter and is used for a myriad of purposes it becomes difficult to police effectively. What is blatantly offensive in one group may be quite normal in another. The more diverse the community the harder it is to administer. What is sad is that the trolls are forcing many people away from the public arena and into safer more exclusive discussion spaces. 

However I don't think this is solely an online issue. If you want to have a discussion and you sit in the middle of the town square where any passer-by can join in you would probably attract a few people who will try to disrupt the conversation. If you gather a group of friends in a room and close the door you will not be disturbed. A colleague of mine remarked in a seminar recently that the net is like an amplifier when it comes to education; a good course can be great online and a bad course can be really bad online. The same amplification effect can be applied to online discussions. In a well-managed environment we can harvest the wisdom of the crowds but without curation the trolls are loose.

Your book just tweeted

I always like to find examples of how digital and analogue can interact with and complement each other and that there is not always a conflict between the two. Penguin Books in Brazil have gained considerable media attention recently by releasing a smart bookmark that communicates with you via Twitter (see article in Springwise, Smart bookmark lets authors tweet at readers who have neglected their novel). The premise is that we are so distracted by social media today that it's easy to start a book and then forget it. Now the book gets a voice in the digital cacophany.

The concept is well demonstrated in the video below but basically it's a physical bookmark that contains a light sensor, timer and a nano-processor with wifi. You leave it in your book and if you don't open the book for a while the bookmark will tweet you a gentle, witty reminder in the style of the book's author. If you still don't pick up your book you will continue to receive regular reminders. Exactly how the tweets come in the style of the book's author is not explained in the articles I have read but I suspect that each book comes with its own bookmark preloaded with that author's potential reminders. You probably can't use that bookmark in any other book though an interesting development could be allowing the bookmark to register the new book via its barcode.

Yet another example of the internet of things where just about everything in our lives will be able to communicate.


PENGUIN BOOKS | Case Tweet For a Read from Rafael Gonzaga on Vimeo.

Social autopilot

  by Mike Miley

Over the last 5 years or so my use of social media has enabled me to develop a diverse and wide network of contacts all over the world. It has also given me the chance to take part in many projects and    discussions that I would never otherwise have been involved in and has given me the opportunity to travel to interesting conferences as guest speaker. The benefits of sharing and networking are enormous but one downside is the fact that once you're on the treadmill it's mighty hard to get off, even for a short break. Anyone who blogs will have noticed that even a week of blog silence has an effect on readership. You have to keep posting, or at least it feels like that.

I sometimes prepare for a holiday by writing several blog posts and then letting Blogger publish them one by one at regular intervals. I've also tried asking a colleague to do some blog-sitting duty. However that doesn't cure a week or two of Twitter or Facebook silence. However there are now tools to cure even this "problem". If you want to look as if you're always online even when you're not you can try Buffer. You simply load up your Buffer account with messages, links and news that you want to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or a combination of the three and Buffer will then send your postings at regular intervals while you work offline or go off hiking in the mountains. Just keep it topped up and it'll do the rest making your network think that you never log off.

Only one drawback as I far as I can see. Social media need interaction to be social and this solution sounds more like broadcasting than interaction. You need to be online to answer questions and discuss. But as a solution for that week when you're planning to cross the Sahara by camel ...

How social are we?

CC BY-NC-ND by /dam

Are we really being social and collaborative on the net or is it all a bit too self-centred? We all love sharing our favourite links, videos, news and pearls of wisdom but where's the social element in that? Isn't it all simply about collecting followers and likes and cultivating our own image? These questions are raised in an interesting article by Brain Andreas, The Secret, Selfish Side Of Social-Curation Sites, where he argues that we haven't really grasped the collaborative nature of today's social web. Most people, instead of engaging in discussion about someone else's post and genuinely interacting, simply "like" or retweet the post without spending any more time considering the post's value.

"Being constantly inundated with our social updates tires us out--we’re fatigued and we’re annoyed with each other. Here’s why: while it is true that no one care’s about your trip to Mexico, your weird tastes in music and the dinner that you just made, we still want to be involved. But we hate the self-serving. We’re re-pinning and re-tweeting without context, without collaboration. The Internet will always suffer from social media fatigue until it allows for seamless collaboration among multi-platforms, multi-dimensions, and multi-media. This may be idealistic view but it’s not impossible."

Of course we all love to get reactions to our posts. There's an awfully empty feeling when you write something particularly clever and no-one even "likes" it. We're all busy curating our identities and trade marks and there certainly is a lot of egocentric activity in social media. There's a degree of interactivity there but it's not real collaboration. One of the comments to the article notes that collaboration is best when identity becomes subordinate to the task, as in Wikipedia. Here the identity of the authors is unimportant but the result of the collaboration is the sole focus. Social media need to be lifted a stage higher to escape from the limitations of liking and retweeting.

"My hope that social curation becomes social, becomes collaborative--a dynamic way of sharing multimedia content with others to create results with substance. I believe in a better way to curate, taking the genius behind Storifying, Pinning, and Instagraming and elevating it to create global connections. Now, one question that remains--is technology willing to open itself to collaboration?"

Twitter for academics

I've been using Twitter as a tool for work for almost three years now and it's one of the most important sources of information about work-related topics that I use. Very few people I know in Swedish higher education use Twitter and although I can understand a healthy bit of skepticism I think there should also be a bit more informed curiosity and willingness to experiment. Most colleagues simply can't see a use for Twitter and many see it only as a medium for updating friends about where you are or what you're eating just now. Twitter is sadly mostly associated with celebrities and chit-chat. It took me a few months before I realized the potential of Twitter but once I realized it just took off!

  by  Brajeshwar 

However if you're doing research or just want to keep up with the latest news and articles in your field Twitter is invaluable. I've built up a network of around 400 people who I follow on Twitter (too many I suspect) and all work with various aspects of e-learning. I get a constant stream of links to relevant articles, news and videos that I can dip into any time and this forms the basis of my own blog posts and articles. I in turn tweet links to all the articles and news I find every day to anyone who wishes to follow me (@alacre).

A new guide has been produced by the London School of Economics to help academics discover the benefits of using Twitter as an integral part of their research activities, Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities. This is a downloadable guide taking you through the most important features in Twitter and heling you to create your own network and using Twitter with your students. The contents of the guide are sumarised as follows:

• Building your following and managing your profile 
• Using Twitter to maximise the impact of your research project 
• Making the most of Twitter alongside your own blog
•  Using course accounts with students 
• A step by step guide to adding a Twitter feed to Moodle 
• Extra resources and links to blog posts and articles on academic blogging and impac

Have a look at the guide and I think you'll see that there are many benefits in getting started with Twitter. The authors of the guide are keen to get feedback so feel free to contact them at impactofsocialsciences@lse.ac.uk.

Delicious - we were only kidding

No sooner than I had posted my farewell to Delicious than Yahoo went public and claimed that they had been misunderstood (see Delicious blog post What's next for Delicious?). They are looking for someone to buy Delicious and insist that they hope that the service will live on. It would have saved a lot of rumour spreading and speculation if this had been clear from the start.

Or maybe they got cold feet when they saw the damage that dumping Delicious would cause to their reputation. That seems to be the conclusion drawn by amongst others Tech Crunch (Yahoo just killed ... consumer confidence in them). From the reactions I saw on Twitter we Delicious fans are a dedicated and vociferous group. It may be a fairly plain vanilla tool with few bells and whistles but it does an excellent job for those of us who like to share our knowledge. With a bit of imagination and a committed owner it could be a star albeit on a limited academic stage. A bargain in the social media Christmas sale?

Why teachers should use Twitter

Many people I meet have the impression that Twitter is simply for telling people where you are and what you're doing and can't imagine how it can be relevant in education. In the last year and a half I've built up a wonderful network of educators who constantly provide me with links to articles, news and ideas that help me in my work. In return I pass on all the links I find that I think will be interesting to my network (I'm @alacre on Twitter).

Here's a very short film that explains why the tool is useful in education - in 60 seconds!

Twitter for teachers, in 60 seconds | eLearning Blog Dont Waste Your Time
- Watch more Tech Videos at Vodpod.

Sedan kan du får många praktiska tips om Twitter via en länksamling, 100 ways to teach with Twitter.

My personal learning environment

There are countless web applications out there that you can use to network and collaborate. I've tried a lot of them but only a select few have made it into my daily life in a big way. Some I use now and then, some I simply can't find a use for, some I can't figure out at all and then there are those that I find invaluable. Here's a list of the tools I find essential for my work at the moment (in a year the list could be completely different).

My Netvibes page

Netvibes
This is top of my list because it allows me to follow hundreds of news sites, blogs, bookmarks and tweets from one page. My Netvibes page is my start page on all the computers I use and it even allows me to have three different sites; one for work, one for home and one public. It's basically an RSS aggregator and is extremely simple to set up and personalise. To see what's happening in the world of net-based education I just need to browse throuth the tabs on my Netvibes page and check any new items of interest. That way I can easily see what I might want to blog about later. Everything I find that seems interesting I share via Twitter. Have a look at my public Netvibes page to see what I mean.

Twitter
It took a while before I realised the potential of this in my work but now it's one of my main sources of information. If you're going to use it in your work you have to spend time finding the right people to follow; those who supply you with useful information. I've built up a long list of people to follow and they supply me with an endless list of links to articles, reports and examples that I can use. I don't follow people who use Twitter to tell about their private lives or just social chat. I never do that either, it's purely a tool for work. To get a good overview of activity on Twitter I use Tweetdeck. Twitter's web site is far less versatile and attractive. Follow me at @alacre.

Skype
If everyone was on Skype we'd never use the phone. Better voice quality than most phone calls plus video and chat. My international contacts wouldn't get far without this.

Google Bookmarks
Simple tool but the ability to access my bookmarks from any computer is so helpful. I'm amazed at how few colleagues use this or even know about it.

Blogger
My three blogs all use Blogger and I find it the simplest blogging tool of all. Maybe not as versatile as Wordpress and suchlike but simplicity is the key.

Google Docs
Sharing documents with colleagues from different organisations used to mean sending versions of a Word document backwards and forwards by e-mail and never knowing which version was the latest. Again I have many colleagues who still do this. Being able to edit a document with colleagues from different locations in real time makes work much easier. You can even use the in-built chat or link up via Skype.

Delicious
Although I have all my bookmarks in Google bookmarks I also collect them in Delicious. Here I can tag them and see who else has used similar tags. I can build up a more finely grained collection of bookmarks here and share them with whoever may be interested. I can follow other educators and see what they're bookmarking and it's this ability to share bookmarks that makes a tool like Delicious so valuable. I've also started using Diigo which does the same sort of thing plus more but so far I haven't been able to get the two tools to integrate.You can follow my bookmarking at http://www.delicious.com/alacre.

Filtering needed in social networks

If anyone from Facebook or Twitter should read this here's my suggestion for making social networking more versatile. The main problem is that when I send a tweet or post something on Facebook, all my "friends" can see it, whether they want or not. Why not let people group their contacts into different categories like family, close friends, colleagues, tennis club members etc and then let you choose which groups to send posts to? In this way I can avoid bothering work contacts with details of my family activities or boring my family with work-oriented comments.

A recurring discussion on edublogs is whether or not you should have students as friends on Facebook. There are advantages and disadvantages of this of course but we could easily solve the problem by enabling this kind of friend filter. Comments that are relevant to my student friends can be easily sent whilst material that is not relevant to them will not reach them. Nearly all of my tweets are about net-based learning but sometimes I'd like to use Twitter to comment on other interests. Either I send irrelevant coments to my e-learning colleagues or I have to create a second Twitter account. If I oould just choose from a quick menu which groups I want to tweet to the problem would be simply solved.

So what about it Facebook and Twitter?

OER interview 5, Chahira Nouira

Another interview in my series on international perspectives on open educational resources and this time I've had a chat with Chahira Nouira who works with e-learning at the United Nations University, Vice Rectorate in Europe in Bonn, Germany. We've had contact via Twitter for about a year so it was a pleasure to have a real discussion with her. We actually wanted to interview each other so it ended up being a dialogue rather than an interview like the others in the series.

Interestingly all but one of the interviews I've recorded in this series have been with people I have got to know through Twitter so there's yet another testimony to the tool's usefulness at work.

In the interview Chahira talks about the UN University's work in spreading open learning, in particular in Africa and we discuss the hurdles faced by the movement in trying to get educational leaders to commit to openness.

Watch the interview (opens in a new window)
See previous interviews: Steve Wheeler (Univ of Plymouth), Nadhir Douma (e-Taalim), Stian Håklev (Peer2Peer Univ), Marit Synnevåg (Oslo - interview in Norwegian)

How social is Twitter?

I've been active on Twitter for about a year now and it has become one of the most important tools I have at work to keep track of news and opinions. I get tired hearing criticism of Twitter as mere trivia and pointless updates on where you are or what you're doing. Twitter is what you make it, like most applications on the net. Even if you do only use it to tell friends your everyday routines and activities isn't that really what the vast amount of human interaction is all about anyway?

I have built up a good list of people who I follow all of whom provide useful information. I decided early on that I wanted to use Twitter as a channel for gathering news and so I have deliberately avoided following people who only tweet about their private lives and where they are just now. I don't really mind who follows me as long as they're not spammers and I must admit that there is probably less than a 50% match between those I follow and those who follow me.

This mismatch is highlighted in a post on EduDemic, 72 Slides Prove why Twitter is not very social, which wonders how much interaction really takes place when so few follow each other. Is Twitter in fact more of a broadcast medium? A group of Korean researchers have produced the following presentation which, although highly detailed, shows that a mere 22% of all relationships on Twitter are reciprocal and calls into question the notion that it is indeed a social network.

Twitter is a great way of building a network and establishing contacts but once established I find it best to use other tools to start a discussion. Conversations in Twitter are rather clumsy and are best conducted as direct messages rather than as public exchanges. Direct messages are only possible between users who follow each other so some dialogues are broadcast to all which can be irritating to all innocent bystanders. So my conclusion is that Twitter is a great network builder but not particularly social.

What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?

View more presentations from Haewoon Kwak.

e-Taalim, web magazine for e-learning in Africa and Middle East

The second in my series of interviews with international experts in the field of open educational resources is with Nadhir Douma, founder of the e-magazine e-Taalim (click on the picture to start the film). E-Taalim is the first website that aims at giving an overview of e-learning in Africa and the Middle East.

The site was launched in November last year and they have worked hard at establishing it as a news channel for e-learning. E-Taalim is available in three languages, Arabic, French and English, and is also active on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. They recognize that the different language groups have different interests and so around half of the material is common to all languages and the rest is more customised.

Net-based education is certainly established in Africa but the number of institutions offering courses is of course small compared with what's on offer in Europe and North America. Some noteable examples are the Virtual University of Tunis, the African Virtual University and the Arab Virtual University. One of the difficulties in the spread of OER is that only 1% of all content on the web is in Arabic so there is a massive need for development in this area. One interesting initiative is the Arab Grid for Learning that is building a portal and community for the development of open learning resources in the region.

The objectives of e-Taalim are as follows:

• Participate in bridging the digital divide and closing the content gap between the African/Arab  countries and the developed countries
• Participate in raising awareness about the use of ICT and Media for education within the African and Arab countries’ corporations and organizations including NGOs and CSOs
• Offer the latest information about corporate e-learning and blended learning for executives and professionals
• Establish an African/Arab e-learning community that will share and diffuse knowledge

See the video interview with Nadhir Douma.

The texting myth

One of the most prolific urban myths in recent years is that teenagers' cellphone texting is seriously damaging their writing skills. Tales of students handing in school assignments full of text abbreviations are passed around the net but is there any truth behind them?

It's refreshing to get the answer from one of the most respected authorities in language and communication, David Crystal in his new book; the aptly named Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. There's an interview with him in Visual Thesaurus, David Crystal on the myth of texting where he states that the texted assignment was really a hoax put out on the net to stir up feelings and then became a truth that people were only too willing to believe. Internet myths are much stronger than myths of the past since they can become global "truths" in a matter of hours.

Abbreviations are used in SMS-texting and, indeed, in the more adult arena of Twitter due to space restrictions. We're forced to cut out all embellishments and focus on the bare bones. Teenagers, argues Crystal, are able to cope easily with different registers of language and realize clearly when texting language is appropriate. Interviews with many teenagers reveal that they can't believe how anyone would use texting abbreviations in school work. It simply doesn't belong there and they all realise that. In addition, by analysing large amounts of text messages Crystal found that only around 10% of words were abbreviated at all, thereby deflating the whole debate.

There's nothing new with abbreviated forms of course. I certainly used them in my note-taking at lectures at university and they certainly didn't get reproduced in my essays. Property terms like des res, all mod cons (desirable residence, all modern conveniences) have been with us for many tears without any fears for estate agents' literacy skills. Somehow the use of devices that many adults still feel uncomfortable with makes old habits suddenly seem threatening.

Let's talk

The debate on the misuse of Twitter back channels at conferences continues and I have to mention another good post on the subject from a participant at the Web 2.0 Expo, Michelle Riggen-Ransom, Web 2.0 Expo: Harshtags, Twecklers and the Silence of the Death Star. She suggests that Twitter flows at conferences should not simply be beamed up on the screen behind the speaker, there should be a moderator function. Admittedly the hecklers would still be able to send their wise cracks but at least they wouldn't be magnified on the big screen.

The other main point in this post is also worrying. The participants were so engrossed in their laptops and cellphones that there was very little direct conversation, one of the main attractions of going to a conference in the first place. I've had the same experience a few times; at break times you look around for people to meet but everyone is too busy typing to notice you. In the end you just find a corner and start typing, look as if you're busy.

Are we hiding behind our devices, afraid of real human contact? Social media can certainly extend the reach of a conference and I have "participated" in several via Twitter, Second Life or web meeting. We can also bring the delegates closer together by providing a pre-conference community site to make contacts. But the main event is actually meeting all these net contacts face to face and discussing over a coffee or an evening drink.

As Michelle concludes:
"Next time you’re at a conference, try putting away the iPhone or the Blackberry during breaks. If you disagree with a presenter, seek them out afterwards, write a thoughtful blog post or contact them via Twitter to start a conversation. Say hello to people. Be open. You could meet someone IRL (!) who could become a friend, a mentor or business partner, or even start a project that makes the world a better place for your being in it."

Spam spam spam

I read recently that over 90% of all e-mail in the world is spam. Despite this it's still the most popular means of written communication. I suppose the world's spam filters must be doing a good job otherwise we would have given up by now. However, even if the spam count is low many people feel engulfed by the sheer volume of non-spam e-mail. It's a long time since we actually enjoyed getting e-mail.

If e-mail has become passé then we get our pleasure in other services. I still think it's fun getting a comment on my blogs or someone mentioning me on Twitter (sad, I know). However there are signs that the spammers are taking over even there. There's a good post on James Clay's blog E-learning Stuff called Ten reasons why Twitter will eventually wither and die. He lists ten threats to Twitter mostly to do with spamming and sabotage which is already creeping in. The sheer openness of the service makes it extremely vulnerable to attack and if your identity gets used for spamming or worse you will of course stop using Twitter (or whatever other service). Similarly bloggers give up when their blog gets bombed by abusive spammers.

Could the openness of the social web be its ultimate downfall? The potential for constructive collaboration is enormous but also the potential for sabotage and trashing. How to we protect our net freedom without restricting it in some way?