Vale's Life Long Learning Blog

 Well my Twitter followings and followers and I ( @vale24) have shared and bookmarked lots of really interesting links recently so here’s a recap in case the speed of one-four-o chit chat has whizzed by you too fast. Catch up on our shared knowledge:

 EFL Pro-active Twitterers have blogged great tips and suggestions

http://twitter.com/burcuakyol

Burcu Akyol Top ELT Pepople to Follow on Twitter tks @burcuakyol for the mentions

http://twitter.com/kalinagoenglish

Karenne Sylvester English Language Teacher’s Guide tks @kalinagoenglish for tech tip #11

We’ve explored new  Twitter tools

• Want to share some audio file you recorded? Try http://tweetmic.com/  
• Want to add Pics? Tired of http://twitpic.com/ see how http://twitgoo.com/ compares
• Need to explain something. How about creating a screencasts for Twitter http://screenr.com/
• Interested in statistics http://twittruth.com/  (found out “I’m an engager” because more than half of their tweets sent are a response or mention another user)
• Hashtag searches http://hashtags.org/  or #hastag submissions and definitions http://tagal.us/
• Twittionary http://www.twittonary.com/
• Need a question answered https://tweetbrain.com/questions/all
• Looking for someone, use the yellow pages http://www.twellow.com/

We have discussed Twitter types and annoying habits

• 15 most annoying types of twitter users by JD Rucker
• Which Twitter Type are You (thanks @maishawalker )

We’ve read up on suggested behaviour

• Twe-etiquette and guidelines

We’ve discovered old and new theories

• The Hierarchy of Tweets
• How might Gladwell / Tipping Point theories apply to Twitter users?

We’ve Analysed the demographics of Twitterers reported in leading papers

• NY Times article: Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens
• Guardian article: The net’s closing in: Ofcom report reveals boom-bust cycle of new media

We’ve browsed top this and top that lists

• 100 Amazingly Insightful People
• 100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics

 We’ve seen the benefits and dangers of letting businesses invade our every second

• Tweet Deals Restaurants

 …so there really is very  little left more me to add!!  

http://twitter.com/

 Well OK then, what  more can I say really except  this is certainly NOT “a communal senior moment” (see http://twitter.com/thornburyscott/status/3551432598 “Is Twitter just a communal senior moment? Chit-chat in the old folks’ home?? )

I suppose, one thing that intrigues me is our range of personal reactions to the 140-characters we receive, so apart from the obvious “must hit reply” or “must RT” reactions, here are my 9 personal reactions for a week in @vale24 tweets

Sample 1 from Sue Lyon-Jones @esolcourses

The opposite of Twitter: new site requires 1,400-character minimum http://su.pr/1UmGnu

gave rise to the “WOW! Who would have thought of that?” reaction

Sample 2 from Steven W. Anderson @web20classroom

Educational Blogs, organized by discipline… http://is.gd/2ycZs (maintained by @mcleod)

led to the “Click Fav” reaction (no time to read now but must see)

Sample 3 from Shelly S Terrell  @ShellTerrell

Homework as outsourcing via @kirstenwinkler http://bit.ly/AeQMS

produced the “create a column for that #edchat hashtag” reaction

Sample 5 from Jeremy Harmer @Harmerj

What are the odds for bumping into Paul Seligson and family by chance at trafalgar square. 2day’s evidence? 100%

provoked the “100%”  reaction

Sample 6 from Gavin Dudeney @dudeneyge

Blue Mars – first ten minutes… can´t turn around and walk back to where I came from. Click to walk? Really? You think that’s good???

sparked the “Are we living on the same planet?” reaction (obviously not!)

Sample 7 from Ojane Grant  @intro_tj reply to BBC Click survey

@BBCClick #techsaving my tech dont save me money. but it sure save me frm going insain lol Yeh right?ght about thisets

confirmed the “Tell me about it!” reaction

Sample 8 from BBC News @the_magazine

Is it ever advisable to grow a Hitler-style moustache?  http://ping.fm/Xdhk3

brought on the “Next question, please?” reaction

Sample 9  from Neil Ballantyne @farang_utang

Interesting talk by @mikewalsh Gravestones in Jpn contain scannable image which plays to a life movie of the deceased on the visitors mobile”

Neil Ballantyne @farang_utang

gave birth to the “Well I never! Whatever Next?” reaction

Sample 10 from Karenne Sylvester @kalinagoenglish

hmmm… I should favourite tweets of my own that I want to find again.  Note to self.

released that “Note to self” reaction

 So you thought sample 4 was missing hey??!  Nope! Sample 4, 11 and 34 ARE missing ?? What are your REACTIONS? How do you react to the 140-characters? Reply here or @vale24 to share your most common or one of those extra-ordinary reactions. Add to this “off-the-of-my head” list,  if you feel like it!

Or perhaps @zappos summed it all up already – tweets make you happy? Do they make you grateful, more open, even less frustrated by life’s experiences? Would you agree they make you so much more observant about little things?  Or perhaps with Tweetdeck on, you’ve turned your head away from the little things that surround you? Which piece of lego are you looking at?  Sure, tweets can be daft and mindless but most weeks thanks to great followers, like the ones I have, the tweets and inter-actions I’m treated to are thoughtful and very inspiring.

Thank you Twitter & Twitterers for all the great emotions!

For all http://www.wordle.net/ users, lovers of “beautiful” word clouds, here’s another neat tool to help with visualizing texts in classrooms or online learning environments.
Same sort of tasks apply (see my Diigo bookmarks tagged WORDLE for more details on using tools like this with learners)

• Predicting
• Summarising

for example,

About WORDSIFT

• Discussing word relationships.

Here’s a YouTube tutorial from

Interesting for academic uses too and another really powerful visual tool!

Having just become familiar with the term “taste neighbours” and after exploring and comparing two social databases www.thinktag.org and www.twine.com I am wondering whether there is also the concept of taste tags. Does anyone use this to describe the ontological structures that arise from online knowledge sharing?

Thinktag is a database that allows users to upload items and share them within a dedicated private or public channel or across platform. The commenting and linking functions allow discourse to develop around shared items that can range from books (one click ISBN upload), video, links, images, files.

Twine a similar platform with a much wider international membership is also fully compatible with other web 2.0 applications such as Twitter, Facebook or Digg.

Thinktag as the name conveys centres around social tagging and allows tags to be manually inserted, updated and edited by registered users, comments i.e. “replies” to inserted item comments and memorabilia also carry tags allowing label on-going dialogues. Twine, even with its recently updated interface does not have this option.  Twine has an automatic tagging feature which will generate interconnected concepts. When I uploaded a video of how to paint Mona Lisa in MS Paint and tagged it Mona Lisa, Paint and clicked saved the community tag box immediately inserted “Microsoft” – fair enough this is straighforward conceptualized connection. What about other patterns and relationships?

Apart from Common Tags what other standards exist? It appears that a lot is based on markup language RDF, OWL, the techonology that enables computers to interpret the data that is then shared. This techonolgy also “understands” the what things are in relation to other things. So will an “apple” tag be referring to Gwyneth Paltrow’s bay, to Apple Inc, the fruit or the Beatles record label?

And how exactly does this system work and what sort of tagging standards exist?  How aware of them are we and how do they influence search, inter-connectivity and flow of ideas?  These are just some of the questions that I am pondering for Module 2 (of my Master in Multimediatà per L’e- learning coordinated by Roberto Marigliano at Rome 3 University) has led me to explore the current evolutions in the semantic connections and social tagging . In  considering how social database contribute or help with personal information overload I will also try to research more fully how automatic subject metadata creation works across languages and cultures. What steps do we need to take as educators to analyze and create environments which move beyond the collective sharing of items towards the cooperative construction of meaningful items and debates?

 On the blog post Why I Migrated to Twine, the author feels the semantic garden that Twine interacts  with “uses machine learning & 300,000 taxonomic categories of the Wikipedia for reference” whereas from my experience of Thinktag (mainly on the Parlare le immagini channel for Roberto Maragliano’s book) tags are entirely “user-generated”. This allows for far greater creativity and personalization but also risks being extremely dispersive and unstructured for meaningful connections in content discovery and sharing.