Category Archives: Twitter

In late January, I began my Saturday morning with what has become a simple weekend ritual of sorts. Roll out of bed. Turn on the coffee maker. And log on to Twitter to read what my followers are discussing.

As it turned out, all my internet friends were busy working on a new project, called A Better CFP. The sequence of events leading up to this moment was simple. Matt Gold (@mkgold) of the CUNY Graduate Center tweeted the question: “How is it that the Penn CFP list still isn’t working? Does any other centralized CFP site exist?” Hours later, Dave Parry (@academicdave) of UT Dallas replied: “@mkgold re:CFP. Not that I know of, but we could just build one. Want to?” And shortly after, a wiki was setup to collaborate on this new project. To date, eighteen different people around the country (and world, for that matter) have contributed to the wiki by sharing ideas about the site, its design, and possible software implementations while considering a feature-set for both its initial launch, and our pie-in-the-sky ambitions.

I’m excited by this.

A highly-collaborative, interdisciplinary, and diverse group of academics all spent part of their weekend to work on an idea that began with only two short text-messages. No one waited to apply for an NEH ODH start-up grant. There were no committees. There was definitely a focused purpose, and more importantly a passion among the participants to contribute to the project. And there was a flat hierarchy that gave everyone an equal voice in the discussion. This is the changing face of digital humanities, and something I’d like to see become more mainstream in the academy.

There is a second development underway which is synergistic in terms of fostering interdisciplinary academic relationships: unconferences. They take many forms, but an unconference is simply a “participant-driven conference around a theme or purpose.” I’m a huge proponent of the unconference format, having organized the DC WordCamp for Educators last fall that brought together 70 educators, technologists (and a few students!) up the east coast and as far away as Michigan to discuss how they’re implementing blogging into the classroom. The day began with pre-planned speakers, and we spent an entire afternoon in breakout sessions led by participants on topics of interest. There have been two other WordCampEd events that have been spun-off in Worcester, MA and Vancouver, CA… so this is really taking off. And I’m proud to say that unconferences made the Digital Campus “top ten most significant stories, trends, and technologies of the year” at #8, as a vibrant alternative to traditional conferences of paper readings and panel discussions that lack the same interaction and participation.

You may have heard of the other unconference that I’ve helped organize with Jeremy Boggs at the Center for History and New Media. THATCamp, which is short for The Humanities And Technology Camp, is a digital humanities unconference that we ran last year. An archived version of our 2008 website is online, which documents participants and their bios, the schedule that we made entirely on Day 1, and a blog which was run by participants to share ideas before, during, and after the conference. We brought together a terrific team of participants stretching across the humanities for this “working weekend.” It was by far one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had at a conference in terms of the knowledge I learned and shared, and the people which I became close to and stay in touch with.

THATCamp is back in 2009, and it’s bigger and better. It will take place June 27-28th, following the Digital Humanities 2009 conference which is being held at nearby University of Maryland (and hosted by MITH). It’s also worth mentioning that the day between conference and unconference, there’s our June Omeka workshop that you can sign up for as well. We’ve secured additional space for THATCamp to support a larger crowd of 70-100 participants, and we’re currently accepting short applications from those would like to attend. Jeremy describes THATCamp as “a conference/workshop/tutorial/networking/tinkering/playing-around kind of gathering, perfect for folks interested in a variety of aspects in digital humanities who want to expand their skills and knowledge.” So I hope that you consider applying for this year’s THATCamp and join me in June! I’d love to see you there. Which brings me back to my motivation for pushing forward Twitter and Unconference. As Lisa Spiro said in her THATCamp Takaways blog post last year, “It’s the people, stupid.” The community at THATCamp and unconferences is tremendous, an a very positive thing for the growth of the digital humanities community.

It is no mistake that Twitter was used heavily among unconference participants at both @WordCampEd, and @THATCamp. Their functions go hand-in-hand. Not only has Twitter served as a back-channel for discussions at unconferences, but traditional conferences and meetings as well. In his recent participation at the Smithsonian 2.0 visit last month, Dan Cohen served as a great example for how this technology can open up discussions even behind closed doors. Following hash-tags, you can find people on Twitter who are even in the same room as you (as I found out at WordCampEd Northeast in Worcester last week). And as chaotic as that may sound, I’m encouraged to see it increasingly embraced by those in the academy as a way of sharing knowledge.

Closing with the original story of A Better CFP, the project appears to be put on hold as Penn works on revamping their current system. Despite that, I still point to it as an example of how individuals can easily participate in and plan projects harnessing Twitter and an active community. Unconferences bring that virtual community together in a physical space, however I think the interactions are largely the same in terms of how we share ideas openly and the doors are open to those who want to participate. Viva la unconference! And I’ll talk to you on Twitter.

Mac users should be aware of dashboard widgets, which are small and contained applications that are displayed on a single screen to allow you to see a lot of useful data at once.  For example, Apple computers ship with built in weather, calendar, and calculator widgets — and there are other widgets for sports scores or USPS shipping data.  Users can download additional widgets to customize their experience, including many in their online directory.  It’s a convenient way to aggregate information in a form that’s both visual, and a keystroke away.  And while widgets aren’t anything new, I wanted to share how easy it is to create them.

The video below uses developer software from Apple called Dashcode, and a Twitter account.  This project was an outgrowth of my Rochester History twitter account – which is place that I occasionally write facts about Rochester History and users ‘follow’ the account.  But thinking bigger, I wanted to create a Dashboard widget for people who aren’t on Twitter.  It took only minutes.

Building Dashboard Widgets with Dashcode from Dave Lester on Vimeo.

My example used Twitter, but you could use a very similar process to handle many different kinds of data.  It’s all based upon having an RSS feed available.  So, if your library catalog outputs an RSS feed then you could easily create a widget of newly added books.  Or if it doesn’t, you could use Twitter in a similar way to provide a data back-end.  What’s also neat, and I didn’t show in the video, is that you can easily embed media content from a feed as well.  A great application of this would be combine a widget with Omeka, which out of the box supplies an RSS feed that’s readable in all themes.  A site-specific dashboard widget could pull from the Omeka items browse page and visually display the most-recently added objects to the digital archive.  What’s new in the archive?  Let’s take a look at our dashboard.  Or a professor could build a widget of class assignments using a feed from ScholarPress Courseware.  The possibilities are endless.

Do you use widgets for anything useful?

Following up a blog post by Tom Scheinfeldt on using Twitter as an outreach tool, I recently came across a service under development called Edmodo. Billing itself as “Twitter for teachers and students,” Edmodo is in alpha testing as a social educational portal, including a classroom-calendaring feature. Based upon the screen capture of the service, I don’t see how this is significantly different than Twitter. In fact, the Twitter API could be used to build a service like this. So while this is nothing groundbreaking, it caused me to reflect on some of the significant changes in social networking of the past year, and how those changes are trickling into online educational tools.

In my judgment the largest shift we’ve seen is that of a “friends activity feed.” In the case of Facebook, I can be notified when my friends modify their profiles, add other friends, or perform any activity (as long as they haven’t disallowed the display of these messages). And while that information was available before, its display is now one of the core features of Facebook itself. Your “news feed” shows the activities of your friends upon logging in. Since then, Myspace has followed suit with a similar feature. These features encourage users to be active on the site in order to gain the attention of others, or be seemingly overlooked among your other collection of virtual friends.

The other change that has been developing is the idea of providing your “status.” In some ways, I see this as an outgrowth of the AOL Instant Messenger away message. Depending on the person, away messages can be informative, have song lyrics, or be an ambiguous word. So has become the nature of the social networking “status.” The free-form nature of it allows anyone to express what they’re feeling or doing at the moment. Twitter’s sole purpose is to express these statuses, while many other social networks offer it as a feature of a larger and further complex social network.

The merging of these two ideas offers interesting pedagogical possibilities for educators who can think outside the box. What are ways that providing a “status,” or sharing text-messages in a public space engages students? What is the benefit of students seeing the activity of their peers in real-time? How can these tools build a greater sense of community and cooperative learning between students?

The nature of social networks often demands a high level of participation in order for them to be worthwhile to participants, and seeing the activity stream of your classmates is only helpful if you check it once, or several times a day. So while the tool can facilitate rapid dialogue between classmates, its usefulness is based upon the students in the class and their decision to be constantly hooked-in, or to not be. Its worth mentioning that other web tools for learning like wikis, blogging, forums, and listservs facilitate the public distribution of analytical work, while Twitter and microblogging services are better-suited for shorter messages in greater frequency. Although I’ve seen microblogging in the classroom, I wonder if its asking too much from students.

Not necessarily looking to displace other tools as ways of classroom communication but rather augment them, Twitter and Edmodo offer interesting possibilities. How can these tools for sharing basic knowledge and engaging in public discourse be integrated into pre-existing tools and computer-based strategies for teaching? The next step in my judgment is integration into courseware management tools like Blackboard, and even ScholarPress CourseWare.