100 ways to use Twitter in education

This post from Jeff Dunn from Edudemic suggests 100 ways to use Twitter in education by degree of difficulty.
He says
"Twitter is a powerhouse for marketing, communication, business, and even education, letting people from around the world work together, share ideas, and gain exposure.
It has become a staple at many online colleges and campuses as well, leaving many academics wondering just how and if they should be using Twitter both in the classroom and in their professional lives. So we’ve revised our our original 2009 list to get you started or up to date.
Whether you’re an academic or just interested in building your Twitter profile, keep reading to learn some tips and tricks that can help you take the first steps towards using Twitter for coursework, research, building a professional network, and beyond."
Some great ideas here.

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

No doubt about it : I don't blog as much as I did ; there aren't so many posts on the blogs that I follow.
In an article 'Blogs wane as the young drift to sites like twitter" in the New York Times Feb 20, 2011 by Verne. G. Kopytoff, we discover the trends. The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.
Among older internet users blogging is still preferred. Some will see Twitter and Facebook as complementary to blogs - a place to promote their blogs.

Peer review : trial by Twitter

Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react writes Apoorva Mandavilli in NatureNews for 19 January. Apparently the practice of
critques of scientific papers via twitter is growing and is of concern to some researchers. Should these critiques be answered?

It's a useful articles and draws together open review practices which have gone on in the scientific community for some time. It also considers how there would be interest in methods to aggregate and quantify all online responses and evaluations of an article.

How Twitter is changing

Brian Solis has come up with an interesting take on how Twitter seems to be developing.
How have we 150 million Twitter users changed in the past year?
For example 69% now share their biography which double last year.
Who you follow says a lot about us.
Only 0.06% Twitter users have over 20,000 followers.
22.5% of users post 90% of tweets.
Take a look here.

How Twitter is changing : new study reveal's Twitter's new direction

Brian Solis writes about a new report from the social media monitoring service Sysomos.
It is true that twitter has changed so much in the past year with users being more willing to share their identity and personal information. Only 2.05% connect to over 1000, and 22.5% of users post 90% of tweets. An interesting read - see here.

Academic excellence in 140 characters

This YouTube video about the use of Twitter to encourage engagement and improve grades could be imp-ortant amd is worth a quick look.

They say :
"This is a video created by one of my students to summarize the research we conducted on the effects of Twitter on student engagement and grades. The journal article summarizing the study and our findings is available online at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10...

Abstract

Despite the widespread use of social media by students and its increased use by instructors, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. This paper describes our semester-long experimental study to deter-mine if using Twitter -- the microblogging and social networking platform most amenable to ongoing, public dialogue -- for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades. A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities. This study provides experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilize faculty into a more active and participatory role."

15 easy to use apps for adding multimedia to Twitter

Want to add multimedia to your tweets on Twitter? Then this article could be your answer : 15 easy to use apps for adding multimedia to Twitter, by Aliza Sherman. I'd come across Twitpic and Audioboo and I love Screenr, but here are a load more.

Twitter Tutorials

Pam Dyer has posted about the best 10 Twitter tutorials on YouTube.
Includes Twitter in Plain English, Getting started with Twitter, Twitter lists in a nutshell, How to do a Twitter profile, Best Twitter tools, Finding Twitter followers, Tweeting from any cell phone, and Twitter for business and branding.

Integrating Social Media as Authoritative Information into Research Pathfinders

Don't be put off by the title : this is an extremely good post from Unquiet Librarian drawing attention to the value of the social Web 2.0 media as valuable sources of information.
Just take a look at the Netvibes page created for the Iran election.
In fact it's following up one of the strands in our book.
POdcasts, blogs, twitter, video, and Google Map.
"By using both traditional and emerging sources of authoritative information, we can provide our students a broader menu of information sources for exploration and to ignite learning through research."

Twitter in the classroom

Blog post from blog.classroomteacher.ca telling the story of classroom use of twitter in school in Ontario demonstrating how the world communicates now, and how it can be used in the classroom as a collaboration tool. Concludes with plus, minor and interesting points.

Here's an excerpt

"Twitter is a neat “little” collaboration tool. You could create individual or group Twitter accounts for your students. A class account follows all of the students so we get a live feed of ideas which you can then project using a data projector.

It’s kind of like using classroom clickers (i.e. SMART student response system), but instead of being limited to multiple-choice answers or numerical responses, you’re texting in short messages. In the computer lab, you could ask a question in response to a text (printed or media) and have students respond on Twitter."

Blogs v twitter

Looking at the list of number of posts I havent been posting so much lately. I know it's been the summer sillly season as I call it, but that is not the whole story. I follow over 30 blogs and the posts are getting less.
Surely twitter has a lot to do with this. It so easy to do a quick post on twitter with a URL. THis is especially true now that delicious has made it easy to add a twitter post. I reckon it might take me a couple of minutes to do a twitter post as opposed to at least 10 to do a blog post. Of course the latter gives me the chance to give more detail, quote, or comment so I shall continue to use both and choose my blog posts from the more meaty items I come across.

Delicious links to Twitter

You can now opt to send a bookmark on delicious to twitter. This could be a powerful way of sharing quickly. When filling in the details on the delicious proforma an option to do this is offered. My first experience of this mirrored many of my other experiences of using a new (to me) service : kick it and swear a few times and eventually it works for you.
Perhaps I was unlucky but I shall keep trying this as it is potentially a time-saver.
Anybody else any experience of this?

The Silly Season

This has been a quiet month for this blog. In a review of our book the reviewer noted that there was also a blog which seemed "fairly active" so I had better come back to life again!
The summer in theUK when Parliament is down, and the PM is on holiday, is traditionally known as "the silly season" and it has been a relief to me to see that the many blogs that I follow also have had a bit of a rest.
There is also no doubt now that twitter (aka microblogging)is the place to keep really up to date and to do this I love TweetDeck - in fact until I used that twitter always seemed rather dull and out of control. Having TweetDeck around on my PC at work and laptop at home and via my iPhone is really great.

7 Things you should know about Microblogging

Educause have produced another one of their 7 things guides, This time it's about microblogging and is an excellent summary which could be used with staff 0r some student groups to justify why this channel is so important for education - and the library.

Twitter Search in Plain English

Here is the latest little video in the admirable Commoncraft series, giving advice on how to search on Twitter. Lasts only just over 3 minutes.

Twitter versus Second Life

After reading Sheila Webber's post about What Librarians think about Second Life, I can't resist mentioning a rather mischievous post I was reading this morning about Twitter and Second Life by Chris Abraham "Twitter Is What Second Life Wasn't: Light, Cheap and Open And That's Why It'll Outlive the Hype Cycle". (I hope she will forgive me!)

He starts with admitting there's a lot of hype about Twitter at the moment and this may be reminiscent how it was with Second Life. But it's different
"Twitter is light, cheap, open and permanent, whereas Second Life is heavy, expensive, closed and ephemeral. Twitter does things right where Second Life failed."
There's some discussion at the end and I guess it's not a fair comparison, but it's a good read.

Facebook and the over 35s

Apparently the number of Americans over 35, 45, and 55 on Facebook is growing fast. In the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled. Developers and marketers may want to think about how to serve this group of new users.
Here are the latest stats on Facebook’s US audience gender and age demographics, according to the company:
Facebook US Audience Growth, Last 180 Days
Looking at Facebook US audience growth over the last 180 days, it’s clear that Facebook is seeing massive increases in adoption amongst users 35-65. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is still women over 55 - there are now nearly 1.5 million of them active on Facebook each month.
The biggest growth in terms of absolute new users over the last six month came amongst users 35-44. Over 4 million more US women 35-44 and nearly 3 million more US men 35-44 used Facebook in March 2009 compared to September 2008.

Wonder what the situation is here in the UK? Certainly seems to be catching on but Twitter is the really fsahionable one.

Here's the link where this came from.

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up

In yesterday's Guardian there was a leaked report on what may be in Sir Jim Rose's proposals for the revised primary curriculum in our schools. The draft plans suggest that children should master Twitter and Wikipedia and teachers will have more freedom to decide what pupils should concentrate on in class.
Children should leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain "fluency" in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.
Looks like there may be some interesting discussions yet to come.

Twitter : we all need to be in the loop

James Harkin ( author of Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are) writes an interesting article in today's Times.
He says :
"Twitter's coming of age, however, is generally dated to the Mumbai terror attacks at the end of November, when minute-by-minute updates of the unfolding chaos zipped around the world by eye-witnesses armed with Twitter on their laptops and mobile phones."
He's concerned that all this tweeting activity, after the initial boost in productivity and creativity, where we are learning to do many things at once, is affecting our brains and could slow us down in the longer run. Are we just tweeting because it is the thing to do?
There's also a little starter's guide to Twitter.

Does your Library Twitter?

There's been an exchange of views on lis-bloogers this week and thanks to Roddy MacLeod a wiki came to my attention too. It's called Twittering Libraries, by Lindy Brown, an MLIS student at Florida State University. She contact 90 libraries with a questionnaire. the wiki is interesting and has sections like What's init for Libraries? Prominent uses in Libraries ; mini case studies of libraries ;Pros and cons of using it ; tools that can extend Twitter ; list of Libraries using Twitter plus a bibliography.