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Searching Twitter

David Hopkins — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:38:08 +0000

So, it has come to this. I wanted to find some tweets I made a while ago; I can’t remember when but I can remember it was a re-tweet of someone else’s work.

I asked around last night on Twitter and had some good replies and these are a selection of the options I have found and been directed to. Thanks go out to the following for their quality replies and help in putting this list together;

And here comes the conundrum … do I keep clicking the ‘More’ button at the page of my latest tweets to go back and back through my tweets, or do I use another service to find what I’m after?

Enter the choices … some are for searching Twitter, others are to backup your Twitter data.

Twitter Search

Search Twitter with the proper and official search tool, but it won’t go back very far or take into account your messages or favourites (like other services do).

Tweetake

Using the Twitter API you can backup a variety of your own data, from followers, favorites, DMs, friends, tweets, or just plain everything!

SnapBird

Here you have the ability to search than just your own timeline; search messages you have received and sent, search someone else’s timeline (not just your own), someone else’s tweets as well as tweets that mention you. Oh, and it searched further back than the basic (or advanced) Twitter search.

TweetBackup

Backup a limited number of tweets (3,200, it’s still quite a few though), and al list of friends.

Google Site Search

This was a good one pointed out to me last night by @kiwicarol – enter a term like “site:twitter.com hopkinsdavid #BB9″ will search all of Google’s archive (as they have been archiving tweets for a while now) that contain my Twitter name and the hashtag #BB9. The results aren’t pretty and takes a while to get your eye in to visually filter out RTs and stuff, but still very useful.

I think I’m going to use SnapBird for the moment as, on the face of it, looks like it’ll give me more opportunity to search back through my timeline to find the links and posts I retweeted (and should’ve made a note of at the time!). I’ll let you know how I get on.

As always please share your experience of any of the above techniques or if I’ve missed on you like/hate, please tell us what and why.

Reading “The iPad for Academics”

David Hopkins — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:52:06 +0000

This article, by Inside Higher Ed called ‘The iPad for Academics” is a good read, and followers neatly on from my previous posts.

I want to draw attention to the following statements, but I’m no going to say why; just that they struck a chord with me (either positively or negatively);

“The iPad represents the genuine retailization of academic content.”

“… publishers might object that piracy would be a concern, but honestly: If you’re selling content to universities that license it to tens of thousands of students living in highly-networked dorm rooms, is an app store really going to make the problem worse?”

“A key feature of the retailization of scholarly content is that it be reasonably free of digital rights management — and here academic publishing should learn from the music industry’s failed attempts to sell copy-protected music. The more open and reusable academic content is, the more reasons people will have to buy it. The great thing about PDFs is that, like MP3s, they are not copy-protected.”

“Overall by splitting the difference between dedicated devices and genuine computers, the iPad doesn’t show a lot of promise as a mobile platform for research and teaching. Of course if everyone is always carrying around an iPad already then they might start replacing voice recorders. It’s hard to tell.”

“While I can imagine some innovative pedagogic uses of the device, what academics do is still narrowly defined — and tied to institutional, political, and economic imperatives. Some imagined the Internet would cause us to rethink what it meant for a text to be coherent — and it has, to a certain extent. The academy might be too obdurate to be easily transformable.”

“Ultimately, academics need a world full of devices they can pour information in and out of. The more open and interoperable our new ecology of applications, devices, and content providers are, the more our learning will enrich human life — whether the people selling us our readers, software, and content are Apple, Amazon, or someone else entirely.”

I have also read through the current responses to the article, and there are some choice examples of people on both sides of the iPad and Apple love/hate divide. I recommend taking five minutes or so and scanning through them as there are some valid points.

If you have a iPad (yes, I’m ever so slightly jealous) and have been using it as part of your academic work, then please let me know how you find it, what apps your using, etc.

Augmented Reality on campus

David Hopkins — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:47:02 +0000

There are many uses for Augmented Reality systems and applications already out there, but most I come across are for more generic “find a hotel” or “find a wifi spot”. These are great, but not really pushing the boundaries of what the technology can do.

I’ve read a little about how AR is being used in Education, which is good and I’ve spoken of these before – “Augmented Reality: does it have a place/future in education?“ and will continue to again as I find the links and research. But what about the other side of the education … not only in and out of the classroom, but to help the students around the Institution?

What about these ideas?

Student Orientation: What’s the worst part of being in a new place? For me it’s not knowing where anything is. You may have a room number, or even a building name, but where is that? If an Institution were to develop something that covered the whole campus (buildings, rooms, facilities, lecture theatres, etc) then the students could use it to find directions to the right place. You could use this to show the student how the campus used to look 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, as well as the history of the Institution and it’s previous staff and students?
Student Induction: Take the above one step further, the whole Induction process and programme could be incorporated (via QR Codes even?) into the app then the student could use the Induction programme to find their next session, the QR Code (placed outside the door to the /building room their about to enter?) to find out more about why they are there?
Library: Why not have an Augmented Reality app for the Library? Search online for the book/journal you want and AR can direct you to the floor and even to the exact shelf where the book or journal is? That would save some time, even more if it could tell you if the book was already out on loan.

These thoughts came about from watching this video on YouTube; created for the Junaio iPhone app, it worked in this example in the indoor 2010 Kiosk Europe Expo to guide visitors around and to help them decide where to go, and when.

If you know of somewhere that is already doing this then please let me know, I’d be happy to know that my thoughts and ideas were already being put into practice.

Also, if you’re interested in developing something like this I’d love to be involved in whatever capacity I could help with! Drop me a line or a comment below

QR Codes: In the Classroom

David Hopkins — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:00:09 +0000

I’ve written previously about QR Codes, what they are, and how we might use them. I’ve met and chatted with Andy Ramsden of Bath University and seen how they have integrated them into the assignment and feedback process.

I saw two links this morning on Twitter that sparked my interest again, both from @psychemedia which has made me realise that I need to brain-dump my thoughts on how these wonderful little codes can be utilised in the classroom.

But first … I have found that there is something about the QR Code generation we ought to know about; this is

Using a QR Code Generator (like qrcode.kaywa.com) means you can have the code store either a short URL or your contact details as text. Be warned: the more data you ask it to store the larger the final QR Code will be.

Example: The BIT.LY address for my blog is http://bit.ly/9iO6xz. The QR Code for this is:

If I used the whole address of http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk then I get this QR Code (ahh, it’s bigger!):

If I wanted to store my Bournemouth contact details (from my email signature) then it looks like this (click to enlarge … but ouch, that’s too big! Use your code reader to find out what it has stored):

So, you see, you have to be careful about, not only, what information you store, but how you generate the information BEFORE you convert it into a QR Code. I strongly recommend that, wherever possible you use limited amount of text/content when you generate your code. If you have access to your own webspace, blog, etc then create a page/post that will contain all the information you want to make available, then use a URL shortening service to generate the shortest possible link to use for the code (see first example above).

So, with that out of the way, I get on with my thoughts about using QR Codes.

How can we use them? They are an excellent way of directing students to content. Whether the content is a book in the Library, a YouTube video, a seminar room at a given time, it doesn’t matter. What matters is working out an appropriate use. So, where can we use them?

I know the limitations of these codes are highlighted if students don’t have smart phones, or a mobile device without a camera, but I’m not dealing with limitations here, I’ll cover that in another post.

Lecture Theatre and/or Presentation

Place the QR Code in a slide that links to a YouTube video you want the students to watch, but you don’t want them to take up your valuable time in your lecture by showing them there and then.
Generate QR Codes that refer to materials the students may want to explore, but you haven’t time to show them in the limited lecture/seminar times.
Place the QR Code in your slides that links to the information about the core text for the lecture, details of what it is and where in the Library it can be found (floor, section, shelf details, etc, or even link to eBook version if it’s available?).
Generate a QR Code that links to an online survey or question you want them to answer while they’re with you, and show them the results (like a CPS system?)
Put the QR Code at the end or your presentation for the students to scan as they exit the theatre, that links to an audio copy of the lecture, or to the activity you’ve asked them to do.

Books & Textbooks

As these wonderful codes are being used more and more, how about the publishers using them in their printed versions to link to publisher-generated, and user-generated, content? This opens up so much more content than a CD in the back cover could ever do! The following YouTube clip demonstrates how this is already being done.

Classroom

Not every classroom has posters and things stuck to the wall, but what if you and your students worked on a poster about, for example, the San Andreas fault line? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to include audio and visual content in the 2-dimensional presentation? While we wait for video paper to come of age and be affordable, the inclusion of a QR Code on the poster means the person viewing it can still access the video content without typing a long complicated link.
If you have a name-plate why not put a QR Code on it which links to your online profile page on the Institutions website? Why not get your business card printed with one it the back; you can then put so much more on it (contact details, publications, research, readings, RSS feed, etc).

Conferences

I originally found information on QR Codes last year when it was blogged about in relation to the codes being placed on conference badges and a useful way for people to collect and share contact details.

Assignments

As I’ve already mentioned, Andy Ramsden and his team at Bath University are leading the way in this field and application of QR Codes, and he recently tweeted that they’d catalogued 1384 assignments. Pleas read about his work as it is not only a good example of using this technology, it is also a beacon for all of us learn from about bringing the various different departments and interested parties together to develop the system and working practice to make it work.

(finally) Blogging

I found this plugin for WordPress recently that sits as a widget in the side-bar that auto-generates a QR Code for each individual page/post. So now you can use a QR Code to save a link as well as browser systems like Delicious.

Video: Sir Ken Robinson “Bring on the learning revolution!”

David Hopkins — Tue, 25 May 2010 11:55:33 +0000

This is a follow on, from Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk at TED ,where he “makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning – creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish.”

ePortfolios: Back on the agenda again

David Hopkins — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:25:03 +0000

This article from Campus Technology made me revisit some of my old posts on portfolio’s (see ‘related links’ below) and that, in the right hands and syllabus structure, “seem to improve student engagement and learning”.

Apparently;

“ePortfolio systems and associated portfolio practices finally are on track to become the centerpiece of educational transformation they always seemed destined to be.”

Does that mean we’ve finally worked out the best way to use them, or does it mean the developers and providers have worked out what it is we need, not what they want to give us?

“Many signs now point to a sudden explosion of electronic portfolio planning, adoption, and rapid market expansion [and] behind this market upswing is the return of academia to the learning values of portfolios based on a recognition that portfolio theory is a good guide for transformation of the academic side of the institution in this time.”

What tools are out there at the moment that are getting the coverage in articles like this:

Mahara: “Mahara is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework.”
ePortfolios.org: “ePortfolio.org is a student-centered platform.”
FolioSpaces: “… provides you with the tools to set up a personal learning and development environment.”
PebblePad: “… is a Personal Learning System being used in learning contexts as diverse as schools, colleges, universities and professional bodies.”

ePortfolio practice is:

“… as an educational process, rewarding and engaging and fits the times; student owned, stays with student over time, produces additional metrics by which to assess and evaluate students, supports high-impact learning experiences outside of the classroom, helps create a strong resume, develops reflective and integrative thinking, supports life-long learning, and so on.”

The article continues by saying traditional VLE-type environments like BlackBoard, Moodle, etc, are at the end of their ‘decade’ and that “electronic portfolio systems are more and more the new center of campus strategic thinking about learning and technology.”

The piece finishes by saying that “electronic portfolios, after seemingly running into a dead end a few years ago, are again a robust growth sector and a path to educational transformation. It’s about time.”

Trent Batson has created this website for all information and links to ePortfolio resources: www.eportfolio-source.org

So, what system are you using or do you plan to use in the next few months or years, and how do you intend to implement it; fully hosted or hosted for you, integrated into your VLE / LMS or stand-alone? Please share by commenting below.

The Art of Blogging (in Education)

David Hopkins — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:32:43 +0000

I have been writing this blog for almost 18 months now, and thought it time to reflect on whether I have stayed true to what I wanted to do here, and to see if ‘the art of blogging’ exists?

I started with a view to organising my thoughts and random reading materials in a vain effort to collate and share with anyone who was interested in the same things as me; eLearning, mLearning, eAssessment, Social Media and Networks, twitter, Web 2.0, etc … all these and more in the world of higher education. Where I have ended up is with a monthly readership of +7000 unique visitors and +500,000 hits, over 1500 people following me on Twitter, and +8000 views of my SlideShare presentations (not to mention 51 instances of the most popular presentation on Twitter embedded on other blogs).

Firstly, what is the ‘Art of Blogging‘?

I write for pleasure and to share my experiences, readings, and rambles around the Internet. Some people like it, some don’t, but blogging is so much more than this.

If you want to be a better blogger the least you should do is participate in ProBloggers “31 days to build a better blog“. The book is the result of a series of daily tasks I signed up to (with several thousand others) last year, covering all sorts of activities such as;

Reader audit,
Dead-link hunt,
Post promotion,
etc

While much of what is covered can be found elsewhere, and is a case of common-sense, the overall delivery and approach of ProBlogger’s work is bringing it all together, along with other uniquely insightful activities that I have not seen elsewhere.

Nicholas Cardot writes about his 6 sure-fire strategies for better blogging, listing;

Grammar,
Content (fresh),
Content (targeted),
Content (creative),
Content (original), and
Content (entertaining)

So, content is important then? Of course, without it there wont be any readers, but of the list above which is more important than others? Is targeted content more important than original, or entertainment over creative? In over 280 posts I’ve made here I’d say each blog entry has it’s own hierarchy from the list above, and no two posts should be looked at in the same way; the the content stand on it’s own.

Does this answer the point of the ‘art of blogging’; I don’t think so, no. I don’t know if there is such a thing as an ‘art’ to blogging that can be easily defined for each of us, other than we all have our own reasons to blog, our own individual need, as well as background and requirement to what we want to get from it.

At the same time as I started this blog entry off I also posted to Twitter;

Within minutes I had some excellent comments, and links, from my PLN including the following wonderful email from Anne-Florence Dujardin, Sheffield Hallam University (thank you Anne);

I’m an experienced e-tutor with Blackboard and Moodle, but it wasn’t always that way. I learnt a lot the hard way by trial and error (nothing unusual here), but didn’t record my journey and part of me regrets that. However, with the advent of social media, I am having to learn a lot of new skills – not so much in the moderation area, but in terms of design and integration of diverse media into a coherent learning ecology. Its to try and capture small moments of insight or difficulty that I have set up a blog. I write mostly about practice, but I throw in comments on readings too.

This blog is mostly for me, but a few colleagues look in and contribute, which I find really valuable. It’s also been used as part of a formal peer review exercise. Having a public to blog to is really useful, even if this public is largely imaginary in my case (I’ve set things up so that my blog can’t be found by search engines).

I am focusing on social bookmarking at the moment. I’ve been using Delicious for my own purposes, but bookmarking is quite a different experience when trying to make it social with students. So there is a lot of new learning for me here. There are practical considerations to using social media in education, which I am capturing on my blog, so that I don’t forget what to do in future, get inspiration when using other social media, and possibly share with colleagues too. Because I am essentially at the design stage right now and only have a small pilot one the go, I make a lot of comments that are practical in nature. I’ve provided a summary of such considerations about Diigo at http://escalate.ac.uk/6764.

I also comment on my teaching practice, to identify what works and what needs changing in future (I am a fan of action research). For example, I’ve written about the first time that I assessed a student’s work in Diigo. Some of the comments are obvious when I read them now, only a few days or weeks later, but they’re still valuable they are recording experience, and sometimes just writing things down pushes me towards new insights or new conundrums or even possible solutions. I also revisit old posts occasionally and comment on them – it may look a bit strange, but I’d rather work that way to try and track how my ideas develop.

Anne-Florence Dujardin, Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies, Sheffield Hallam University
Twitter: afdujardin

iPad – is it any good for the classroom or learning?

David Hopkins — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:32:20 +0000

Well, it’s here; the iPad has finally landed.

I had said on Twitter that I wouldn’t blog about it until I actually had one (and I’m still thinking about it) but I have read quite a bit over the weekend about and wanted to bring together the various threads of thoughts and ‘research’ already out there on whether it will be good for students, and the classroom, or not.

I’ll start with my final words (!) and they are simply how can we be sure that the iPad will be any good if we’ve literally only just got it (not in the UK we haven’t!)? We may know how the theory fits in with technology and student fashion, but will it work, will the students buy one (or even can the afford one, given that they’ve already got a smartphone and high-end laptop?) and will they see the benefit to their education, or is it just another shiny Apple device? It could be that we, the educators and facilitators, are the only ones who see its potential, and talk to each other about it as the students carry on with their existing kit.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve found …

Tony Bates: Educational affordances of the iPad:

“Although the iPad suggests an exciting future for the design of teaching and learning, we need to bear in mind that many people still have limited broadband access, which is essential for such developments. So the iPad will at least initially further widen the digital divide.”

Elliot Masie: iPad First Look for Learning:

Frederic Lardinois writes on ReadWriteWeb: Colleges Give iPads to All Incoming Students:

“Seton Hill University plans to give every first year undergraduate student a 13″ MacBook and an iPad. Just last month, George Fox University in Oregon also announced that it plans to give its new students a choice between a MacBook or an iPad. The question, though, is if programs like this aren’t a bit premature, given that nobody has actually used the device yet and that we don’t really know how well the iPad will work for textbooks and other school-related activities.”

Brian Chen writes Colleges Dream of Paperless, iPad-centric Education:

“One hitch in the universities’ plans [see above by Frederic Lardinois] is that Apple has not inked deals with any textbook publishers to bring their offerings to the iPad’s iBooks store. So far Apple and publishers have only formed partnerships around e-books for fiction and nonfiction titles, like those available for the Kindle.”

Bridget McCrea writes Measuring the iPad’s Potential for Education:

“The fact that ninth graders like Nothstein are somewhat blasé about a device whose heavily anticipated launch attracted millions of eyeballs around the world isn’t exactly surprising. Call them jaded, but today’s K-12 students have the world at their fingertips when it comes to technology, and are only limited by budget when it comes to getting their hands on items like Apple’s new iPad.”

James Tubbs writes Powering Your Classroom with the iPad, Part 2:

“The effective uses of the iPad in the classroom will multiply as educators adapt to this exciting new technology and find ways to innovate their teaching methods accordingly. As Robert Reynolds notes in his article about the iPad’s future in education , the ultimate educational use of the iPad and similar technology will depend entirely on how students respond to it.”

iPad in the Classroom:

“Today, iPad is probably not the answer, but as a concept it is a stage-setter that gives us a glimpse of what the technological landscape may look like in the classroom of the not-so-distant future. While the iPad may need several iterations before it becomes a sleek and elegant classroom solution (multi-tasking?!?), this should be a wake up call for the educational publishing industry.”

Bob Brogan writes First Look at the iPad for eLearning:

“Another drawback for eLearning and purely from my viewing the initial demonstration, was the appearance of a lack of multi-tasking capability. This may also be a hindrance. Quite often someone wants to working on a document or some other material as they are reviewing eLearning content or sessions.”

Steve Kolowich writes iPads on Campus:

“The e-learning giant Blackboard, meanwhile, today is announcing that it is launching an app for the iPad that will allow students to access their courses from the new device. “

WISE Pedagogy: iPads for Education: How Much is Hype?

“Unless you are a devoted Apple fan who would use a new Apple device anyway, or you teach at a school that is giving each student his or her own iPad, you might want to wait a few months before you buy one solely for pedagogical purposes. Time may tell whether this new device will have enough advantages to surpass the others that are already available. Even if you and some of your students already do have iPads, it may be a while before we can expect to design lesson plans that incorporate them into course activities.”

Robert writes Is education ready for the iPad?:

“iPads are been handed out to students from three universities and faculty with hopes that Apple’s tablet will transform education. These universites … pre-ordered bundles of iPads with plans to experiment with how the tablet could change learning in the classroom. Officials from each university saw the iPad as having potential to render printed textbooks obsolete. One dent in the universities’ plans is that Apple has not inked deals with any textbook publishers to bring their offerings to the iPad’s iBooks store. So far Apple and publishers have only formed partnerships around e-books for fiction and nonfiction titles.”

Libraries and Cloud Computing

David Hopkins — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:39:32 +0000

There has been much written about Cloud Computing in recent months, and this presentation is a good resource to add to the mix; looking at what advantages, or disadvantages, can be expected for a library in the Cloud (I tweeted this presentation over the weekend but, after re-reading it, thought it worthy of a post here);

Libraries and the Cloud

I found the following statements struck a chord that I’ve already emailed them to a colleague who works in a library, along with the presentation;

“The days of each library operating its own local servers have largely passed. This approach rarely represents the best use of library space and personnel.” Marshall Breeding (Slide 57).

“The University of Westminster estimates it has avoided a spend of £1million in moving to the cloud, cutting expenditure on new hardware and software upgrades.” (Slide 70).

“I don’t see a major difference between hardware obsolescence and service obsolescence.” Michael Klein (Slide 84).

and perhaps the biggest quote, which can be applied to many elements of higher education, not just the library;

“The biggest cultural component is that organisations have to become more willing to use platforms,. technology, and services that they don’t directly control.” Carl Frappaolo (Slide 89).

Are you involved in any form of Cloud Computing? If so please let us know what you’re doing, and how you have achieved (or aim to achieve) it.

iTunesU: Another success story (UCL)

David Hopkins — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:33:19 +0000

I was thinking about my posts that cover iTunesU the other day and then found this presentation (only uploaded to SlideShare recently) from Jeremy Speller on “UCL and iTunesU“:

View more presentations from Jeremy Speller.

Can you answer me the following please … who, out of everyone out there, has had the discussion with their management on whether your Institution should (or will) be on iTunesU, or indeed you’ve had the meeting and the decision was made not to make materials available in this way?

If the answer was in the negative, are you in a position to let us know the reasons why (if so, can you leave a comment please)?

It also seems that Jeremy has been a clever boy and used this special little script called KeyNoteTweet – code.google.com/p/keynotetweet/ – but is only available in an Apple Keynote presentation.