@johnjohnston the fluttering hither and thither, a veritable moth, enjoying itself to the full of its bent. moth pic.twitter.com/OiWvLRYn2R
— moth generator (@mothgenerator) November 15, 2015
One of my favourite blog post series, Tom Woodward‘s Weekly Web Harvest had a good haul this week including a link to this delightful twitter bot, moth generator (@mothgenerator). I took a few hours to get my moth but worth the wait.
The bot generates a moth image from the text you tweet it.
I’m not on holiday at the moment but taking the odd day off over the summer. Yesterday was one. I found a good set of amusing links, here are a few.
The New Devil’s Dictionary From The Verge updates Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.
Examples:
blogger (n.): An invasive species with no natural predators.
GIF (n.): Many prefer to pronounce this word “GIF,” instead of the more controversial-sounding “GIF.”
music (n.): An art form whose medium is copyright law.
And so on.
This reminded me to google for an english translation of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, hoping as usual for a creative commons version that could be played with. As usual I didn’t find that but got In Place of Thought – The New Yorker by Teju Cole which adapts the idea for modern times:
COFFEE. Declare that it is intolerable at Starbucks. Buy it at Starbucks. EVOLUTION. Only a theory. FASCISM. Always preceded by “creeping.” FEMINISTS. Wonderful, in theory. FISH. A vegetable.
Ouch, that last one stung!
Checking Teju Cole (@tejucole) on Twitter as his ideas started as tweets, I found:
Back in March I had a wee shot of periscope. Since then I’ve sen a few notifications pop up on my screen, but not often had the chance to watch. Often they are fairly trivial, folk at the zoo or watching traffic or just testing the app.
Today I saw this tweet:
because i enjoy living on the edge, gonna try broadcasting my #UMGRC presentation in 25min on a platform i’ve never used. #whee #periscope
— Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) August 6, 2015
And hit the link. Turned out it was a presentation at UPEI Multidisciplinary Graduate Research Conference from a Workshop by Dr. Bonnie Stewart 1 on Becoming a Networked Scholar. 
I watch the first 45 minutes of the broadcast from a couple of different rooms at home. A very engaging presentation on social media in Higher Education, much in my opinion directly transferable to PL in primary and secondary education. For a short while you can see the video at: Bonnie Stewart on Periscope, but I don’t think that will be around for long. After I tweeted out the fact I was watching some one asked me about the quality:
@daniellynds @UPEIGSA sound is great, visual not too bad, scren hard to see, but hey, other side of the world via a phone!
— john johnston (@johnjohnston) August 6, 2015
In the age of mobile we take for granted tons of things, but we now have amazing power to communicate in our pockets. For her tweets it appears Bonnie joined periscope just before she started broadcasting. It certainly didn’t take any technical expertise on my part to watch.
As I tweeted, the audio and indeed the video was very clear and synchronised. The Screenshot is slightly blurrier than average. The projector screen was not to clear, but the whole thing was very watchable. NB. bonnie’s slides are up here: Becoming a Networked Scholar.
I was supposed to be going to the post office but delayed as long as possible, I am pretty sure that the stream would hold up on 3 or 4g but unfortunately the audio is cut off when the lock screen is on. That might be an improvement for periscope or my audio bias showing.
This has certainly given me the idea that you can broadcast with periscope with a deal of confidence and make a good fist of it without a lot of prep. I guess if you wanted someone could screen capture the video. Looks like it might be a useful TeachMeet tool, classroom use would have to be though about carefully, but it could certainly be used to bring video into a classroom simply. With more and more primary classes using twitter it doesn’t seem much of a jump to use a teacher’s phone to project onto a screen or, network allowing, to watch on a desktop.
Despite all the pushes to “bring Twitter to the classroom” and calls to have Twitter “replace traditional professional development,” I’m less and less convinced that’s a good idea — or at least, I’m more and more convinced that we should not rely solely on Twitter as the site for online PD or for online educator community. Both can and do exist online — PD and community — but I’d wager the best place to find both remain on educators’ blogs. I wonder if, in fact, “the future of professional development” might be a “return to blogging.”
via Is Twitter the Best Option for Online Professional Development? from the Hack Education blog.
That would be a nice development in 2015. I’ve blogged a lot about twitter and while it continues to be a good tool, I’d go along with the questioning of best. I suspect our professional standards are looking for a bit more depth too?
Got a web site?
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Bridgy is for you.
Bridgy lets you post to social networks – and comment, like, reshare, and
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Check
out this example, or see the docs for more details.
from: Bridgy
This looks like a really exciting development in social media. Recently most of the commentary on blog posts has moved to twitter, g+ or facebook. This looks like it could link that up and push out posts and then pull comments made on other sites back to your blog.
The Teach the Web Week 2 is about Connected Learning in Practice
Last week we explored “Making as Learning”. We’re proponents of the idea that people learn best through making, but we also believe that making and learning are social activities. It’s a bit like the old idiom “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If you make and learn, but don’t share and gather feedback, have you really learned? How do other people’s perceptions influence how we understand the world around us? How does being connected change the very fabric of our world?
So I am thinking about learning communities. Mostly about the practical way the connection happens in the #teachtheweb MOOC.
I joined this MOOC, the Mozilla Teach the Web. It follows the same sort of organisational structure as etmooc, using several different web sites and services:
This seems a reasonably inexpensive way to organise a learning community and for the most part works very well. I have only just started with the #teachtheweb MOOC and only fully participated in #etmooc for the first two or three weeks, but I’ve found, when I had the time, it is fairly easy to keep up with the communities.
As far as I can see almost all of the interaction, especially in #teachtheweb is taking place on the google plus group.
So there are 3 main spaces involved in this sort of community. These could be categorised as: Long Form, blog posts; medium on google plus and micro on twitter. Of course there is plenty of cross posting of blog posts to g+ and tweets that help connect the spaces together.
Each type of interaction has its benefits and each its drawbacks.
One of the really appealing aspects of this set up is that participants own their own space and can participate by posting to their own blogs. This has been shown, for example in DS106 to be a powerful tool in community building.
Apart from the buzz and enjoyment of having a ‘domain’ of ones own the way blogs can be aggregated into one stream, either an official one, built on, for example, FeedWordPress or through the use of an RSS reader make it easy to connect with others while maintaining ownership of ones own space. WordPress blogs in particular (unlike this one) are great at collecting mentions or trackbacks from other blogs.
It would be interesting to see if this could be extended into the shorter conversations taking place on twitter and google plus. I’ve found the google plus communities to be good places to interact with other folk and keep up with what is going on. I’ve found it harder to keep track of what I’ve done there.
Google plus scores over twitter in the ease of interaction, there is more room for replying and the conversations can be richer in both media and length.
Google plus falls down in trying to find the things I’ve commented on or given a plus one. There is a page on google plus that lists things I’ve ‘plus oned’ on the web (I hardly ever do this) but it does not collect those I make inside a google plus community.
I’d really like a page where I could view my activity on the community. In twitter I use favourites as a quick way to bookmark things I want to revisit. I was in #etmooc trying to use the +1 button for the same thing, it doesn’t work, basically the use of the +1 is to let the person making the post know you like it.
I’d also like to be able to view a stream of my comments on other folks posts and one of my posts. Perhaps there is a way to do this that I’ve not found?
There are one or two features that could help. It would be nice to tweet a link to a google plus ‘post’, on an iPad. The iPad has a great google plus app, I’d like to be able to copy a link to a post. Unfortunately although this can be done in a desktop browser in a few click (a few too many) I’ve not managed to do this in either the iPad google+ app or in the few mobile browsers, safari, icab and chrome, I’ve tested.
I’d love the google+ iPad app to support the same sort of sharing that my ios RSS readers do.
This RSS reader, FeeddlerPro allows me to customise the sharing menu, there are more possibilities that the ones I use.
If this was possible in G+ it would be a lot better at connecting my learning.
These are being put at the heart of the practical tasks for the #teachtheweb MOOC. They are easy to use online web making tools. I’ve a few thoughts about how they work, but that is for another post. The feature that is really great for connecting to other learners is the idea that you can take another persons thimble project and remix it by simply adding a /edit at the end of the URL.
Unfortunately at the moment there is no way to see a trail of how different projects are being remixed. This does seem to be in the works. Once that happens this will be a more powerful tool for connected learning, one could see how others have remixed the same project and how people have improved and iterated on your project.
The other thing that would be useful would be to see the trail of your own iterations of an idea. At first I was annoyed by the fact that each time I saved an edit in thimble it was saved as a separate URL my next version would have a new URL. In fact this might be a positive feature, if tracked, it would allow me to see and share my progress through a task.
What I’d really like if for all of the sources of activity to be able to be gathered, aggregated redistributed and mixed up together. I imagine a page where I could see links to all of the recent blog posts, tweets and google plus stuff, even better if things you made with the web maker tools were in the mix. This could be filtered so that you could view one persons activity, or activity around a particular tag or topic, eg. Week2
I guess there is not a lot of hope for this emerging from the tools available at the moment, twitter removed RSS and g+ has never supported it. Understandably these free to use services are interested in keeping you inside their own environment rather than viewing content from them on other places. I wonder if better tools for open learning are around the corner.
Recently I’ve played with 3 ways of collating tweets:
Storify allows you to search lots of social media and pull content together, I noticed Doug Belshaw using it and gave it a whirl for some twitter activity around and episode of Radio Edutalk: Radio Edutalk 20111124 · johnjohnston · Storify. Storify is pretty simple to use there is a side bar search where you can search across different social networks:
Once you have found something you just drag it into the story.
List Of Tweets lets you search for tweets and gives you an HTML or plain text list:
Nice and simple, easy enough to style the list.
Exquisite Tweets has had a fair bit of linkage, it trys to catch related tweets (replies I guess) but you can paste in links to individual tweets, here is a rather strange conversation I today: Exquisite Tweets from johnjohnston, BTCare. I’ve still not heard from BT officially but tweeting seems to have fixed my line.
If you feel the need to capture a bit of twitterage yes. I’ve not clicked the link to tell me how much of my life I’ve spent on twitter yet, but for other folks results if we spend so much time on there some of that life must be worth keeping.
7 DEC: Just noticed Aaron’s Twitter Viewer on Daring Fireball Linked List: Aaron’s Twitter Viewer
Unfortunately site has been overwhelmed by Fireball readers so I couldn’t try it out. Here is the DF example: Twitter conversation with aaronsw. Iy looks neater than exquisite tweets.
A couple of weeks ago I watched Doug‘s video How I Use a MacBook Pro on of the ways he discussed was a very new (beta) service ifttt.
ifttt stand for If This Then That and I requested a beta invite that arrived a day of three later. I’ve now had a look over the site and set up my first task.
This is a simple one, if I tag a link on delicious with @comment it will be tweeted (Hopefully with commenting at: ). I post @comment tagged links to delicious with a keyboard short cut so the whole thing should be painless.
This is a really trivial use of ifttt, and I can see a lot of more powerful uses for the service. I like this sort of thing, the way posterous post stuff on to flickr, twitter and this blog for example.
We also do a little of the same sort of thing with edutalk.cc, auto posting audioboos tagged edutalk to the moderation queue.
In fact my first thoughs were that ifttt could replace my rather clunky system for doing this. Unfortunately, at the moment ifttt only supports posting text to your main posterous blog and as far as I could see will not post to the moderation queue. I was also looking at posting my shared google reader to a new posterous blog but as it is not my mail one this will not work yet.
I am saying yet as the service seems to be developing quickly. I did manage to create a task to post my google reader shared items onto my tumblr blog (I’d almost forgotten that one). I usually star/like stuff in google reader to check later but will now try to share ’em too to see how ifttt works out.
Finally I really love the interface of ifttt, very clean with huge text and icons. The process to create a new task is very simple with a fair bit of possible customisation:
I am looking forward to seeing how ittt develops.
Update:I seem to have flooded ScotEduBlogs with my tumblr posts. I’d forgotten that it was listed there. Apologies. I’ve now removed the blog from SEB.
A while back I noticed More Code Fun: Reading (or ‘to Read’) List – CogDogBlog which pointed to Reading: keeping on top of stuff I save | Helpful Technology The site has a nice byline Digital innovation for people with more sense than money when I grabbed the code to create my reading list.
My reading list pulls together various RSS feeds: my delicious, things live starred in google reader, instapaper & instapaper. I read my google reader and twitter on my phone. I don’t always want to follow the links so star or favourite them for later consumption. The reading list. pulls all of these together. Easy to use and I like the way it combines existing services rather than needing a new one. I’ll easily be able to add other feeds if I want to later on.
“REMEMBER! Real snow is the best! You should only really be here if you get too cold or fed up with playing out, snowballing or building snowmen!”
RSS image from used under NounProject Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported
As I wonderd if schools were open this morning I checked the North Lanarkshire Council : Winter schools daily update webpage which was down so turned to nlcwinter (nlcwinter) on Twitter there were no new updates at that time so I tweeted:
@nlcwinter http://www.northlanarkshire.gov.uk/winter is down?
— john johnston (@johnjohnston) November 30, 2010
@nlcwinter http://www.northlanarkshire.gov.uk/winter is down?
Tue Nov 30 07:14:02 +0000 2010 from web captured: Tue, 30 Nov 10 01:59:51 -0600
Very quickly I got this mention:
RT @johnjohnston: @nlcwinter http://www.northlanarkshire.gov.uk/winter is down? http://bit.ly/gyzVwx
Tue Nov 30 07:17:20 +0000 2010 from twitterfeed captured: Tue, 30 Nov 10 08:00:43 +0000
Intregued I went to isdown (isdown) on Twitter where the profile weblink lead to this tweet:
Learning from first hand experience this is an interesting search on Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/57fzra
Sat Nov 22 18:24:21 +0000 2008 from TweetDeck captured: Tue, 30 Nov 10 08:01:21 +0000
I am guessing someone is using something like twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter to auto tweet the rss for the twitter search (probably using advanced to skip too much recusion by getting @isdown’s tweets?)
I’ve used twitterfeed.com to post my blog posts to twitter and for @scotedublogs to tweet all the new ScotEdublogs posts but this takes it a bit further, I guess they use the syntax for not including tweets from @isdown itself.
Anyway an interesting way of using twitter that has me thinking a wee bit. I’ve not tried any simpe twitter stuff since the OAuth authentication came in, might be time to have a wee look at it.
