For a while I even got too busy (read: too frazzled) to attend to my PLN and be courteous to all my friends and connections who so freely share all their knowledge, expertise and insights.

So this Twitter Mosaic is to give credit where credit is due. Thanks!

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Connected learning

First, I want to make visible how much I’m learning from being connected. The last 24 hours is a prime example. Twitter’s replies function is still down, so last night I went on Plurk and in a few hours playing with the other eduTwitter immigrants, we learned its technicalities but also began thinking about its limitations, variations in microblogging and how interface differences changed our interactions. This morning I’ve spent one hour creating, editing and embedding our institution’s Wikipedia page and had to learn to create pages, create categories, learn a different wiki syntax. I can’t get over how many skills and insights you pick up and how fast, when you’re a connected learner.

Inspiration

My second reason is the blogging blues which hit me earlier this year. For me it’s easier to blog about the simple things like my Moodle Wishlists. Listing what I’ve learned in a week will be straightforward, easy and motivating. Hopefully it’ll give me the inspiration to tackle the other edu-balls-of-yarn in my head.

My blog is built around the metaphor of the kiwi bach which sits between the stable land and the changing sea. Educational technologists (technology intgrators, e-learning advisors, whatever the term) seem to fulfill much the same role, sitting on the boundary between the stable field of education and the tempestuous  technology. So in that vein, I guess this is the start of my beachcombing.

First beachcombings already in draft.

Had some fun with Wordle. After playing with TweetStats yesterday, wanted to get those tags and use them in Wordle. Unfortunately they weren’t weighted. So result is a bit bland but still fun.

Wordle is set up to link with del.icio.us and because it does weight those tags, the result is much more impressive!

Embedding in a blog post requires a little editing of embed code – need to take out all the spaces.

Could be used to introduce a topic in class? As result of a discussion thread?

All that is a long-winded way of saying:

thanx/@twitku/575 xj

Twitter is what you make it through sensible stalking. Who you are following and who is following you is critical to the quality of your Twitter experience.

Choose people who are exploring your field of interest (Wenger’s domain?) and pertinent thoughts, tools & technologies will come flying at you at the speed of light. You’ll make new contacts through them and hear just-in-time when events (webcasts, live conferences, or f2f conferences) are happening. It’s even possible to attend F2F conferences vicariously, as the edutwitterers discovered with this weekend’s Educon2.0. Additionally your followers are an informed peer group that can provide insightful answers to your questions.

But stalk sensibly, or end up reading a lot of “what i’m having for breakfast” tweets.

To find out who is tweeting about your interests, use a Twitter search engine like Terraminds.

• 3 Months ago – the author of a book I’ve read many times and a blog that I follow weekly. So disappointed I didn’t get to meet him in person when he was in New Zealand in 2006. Will never get that chance again.

• 1 Month ago (post-Twitter) – a fellow Twitterer whose daily tweets on ed tech are always interesting. I now also know what his kids are up to.

• Today – someone I’ve collaborated with on a wiki.

Tomorrow Will is presenting to a large group of teachers and wants them to “walk away understanding the power of connections that can reach far beyond the classroom.” To this end he has asked his network to chip in and leave their best tip on a wiki. Read about it on Weblogg-ed and leave your bit.

Well it turns out that not only is it educational, it is addictive. How? In a variety of ways. For instance by helping me find neat tools as today I discovered 3 new tools and Adobe AIR in the space of an hour.

This can happen directly and indirectly.

First an example of the indirect way. Will Richardson (willrich45 on Twitter) is one of my fav bloggers and so one of the people I started following on Twitter rightaway. His tweets appear in my Twitter list. And when the following 3 messages cropped up in a short time, it piqued my interest…

willrich45 (@ – W): Wow…only 27 tabs open in Firefox…slow day! 1H Ago

 

willrich45 (@ – W): @tgelston Nope…what is it? 56M Ago

 

willrich45 (@ – W): @tgelston Thanks for the link…the offline reading looks great! 15M Ago

So I decided to visit the other side of the conversation whichWill Richardson was having with tgelston. Now tgelston is not one of the people I’m following, but I can go and have a look at his tweets:

@willrich45 something between tabs and bookmarks about 1 hour ago from im in reply to willrich45

@willrich45 http://tinyurl.com/yrlqrj about 1 hour ago from im in reply to willrich45

This tinyurl led me to tool no. 1: Read It Later, a promising extension for Firefox which allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest..

A more direct route to a new tool is the imprint that most tools leave within a Tweet,  as in this Tweet from kboutelle

@ATC_tobias FYI – if you don’t already know, Moodle Meet times are CST. 8 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to ATC_tobias

From thwirl? Never heard of it. So I clicked on the link and discovered tool no.2 Thwirl which is a twitter desktop client based on the Adobe AIR platform.

And sometimes it gets even more direct, when someone simply posts a Tweet about a tool they like:

NancyWhite (@ – W): I find twits much easier to read in Snitter – love the images. They allow me to visually scan for people. 1H Ago

And that led me to tool no. 3, Snitter is “Snook’s Twitter”: an Adobe AIR-powered application for twittering. (The tag line is “I can’t believe it’s not Twitter”, har har.)

And the last two apps make mention of being Adobe AIR-powered, another thing I had not heard of until today, but which appears to approach an Apple-like desktop with widgets. This will warrant a closer look…

3 tools and Adobe Air in under an hour. Thru Twitter I’m keeping my finger on the techno-pulse…