April 2009 Archives

For a reason I am not entirely sure of, I decided to start playing with twitterfeed today. twitterfeed is a service that will periodically check rss feeds of your choosing and then post new items to your twitter stream.

I started by thinking how cool it would be if any time anyone posted anything at blogs@psu with the psuets tag, it could show up on the ETS twitter account. Same thing for posts tagged with tltsym09 and the TLT symposium twitter stream.

So, I figured I might as well try out this little tool before I get too far ahead of myself thinking of the opportunities. I hooked up this blog's feed to my twitter account.

It worked. Okay, so let's hook up my link blog, too.

Now I was hooked. I just posted content over at the blogs@psu news. Why not hook that up to my twitter account also?

Then the bell really went off. Ding! Why not hook up the comments feed of my blog up to my twitter account? I configured twitterfeed to only send the most recent new comment, checking every 30 minutes. So at most, one comment tweet will be sent every thirty minutes. This blog doesn't get that many comments, so in reality there will be far fewer tweets going out. Although with new comments being fed to twitter, that may very well change.

I have known for a while that one of the most important new features needed on blogs@psu is "email me followup comments" feature when leaving a comment on someone else's blog. Without this, conversations on a particular blog post can easily whither. Well, in the meantime this twitterfeed can help remedy that. maybe. We'll see.

One cavet to twitterfeed: you have to let it know your twitter password. It's really the only way something like this can work. I threw caution to the wind. You may not be as free-spirited. Update: As I was writing this, twitter launched it's oauth support, a more secure way to authorize api access.

After a few days out of circulation, I come back to find some posts on the PSU Voices I mentioned in my previous whiteboard post. The Reverend's and Cole's posts pretty much layout the potential and thinking behind this tool, so I don't feel a need to repeat it. Read their posts.

Along the lines of Jamie Oberdick's comment, what surprised me about this search page is that I have found myself using it for searching all these social sites at once. Getting the local (PSU) content mashed in with that is such an added bonus. I'm simultaneously getting the local and global results. I am curious to see where this path will lead us.

Erin Long and I visited Penn State DuBois this past wednesday to talk about blogs@psu and how it can be used for teaching and learning. I started out talking about blogging in general, and swung into personal content management and learning portfolios. Erin went through specific examples with Comm 180 and English 202 and how they used blogs in those courses. Lastly, we helped everyone get started with creating their own website with blogs@psu. There were around 14 people in attendance, a mix of faculty and staff. I had a great time meeting everyone. It was a lively group.

You can find our slides below. I am happy that these slides just served as a jumping off point for a conversation with everyone in the room.