iSean

i have 2 Twitter accounts. one is a professional account that has a focus solely on what i do in my career (largely ed tech stuff). the other account has nothing to do with ed tech stuff so i figured i’d just have a second twitter account for it. on this other account, i am just silly. i post infrequently but what i do post is intended to be funny. i have 62 followers and i follow about 12 comedians and folks i find interesting. this account is for entertainment only. my professional account is used to follow 23 folks who post about ed tech stuff. i am very careful about who i follow on both accounts and i don’t automatically start following someone just because they choose to follow me — i try and control the feed i get.

now, the problem i have with Twitter is that it’s very difficult to use this tool professionally. i can try and follow folks who add interesting ed tech stuff, but that doesn’t mean that the people i follow will stick to ed tech stuff; they don’t. some people view their Twitter participation as an invitation to tweet professionally and personally all on the same account. fine — there aren’t any rules against that, eh? but this kind of participation means that for me to get the ed tech stuff i also have to sift through learning about what is being cooked for dinner and how little Tommy Jr. is flying a kite. Twitter doesn’t have a feature that allows me to only get the professional stuff. i could fire people who choose to post whole life tweets, but then i’d miss the valuable ed tech tweets. so, for the time being i’ll continue sifting through the tweets about someone sitting at the airport, but i’ll keep my fingers crossed that Twitter is exploring a way to make Twitter more friendly for professional users. i am not holding my breath . . . the bottom line is that it’s probably up to the users to police themselves. then again, maybe i am in the minority and everyone else loves reading tweets that run the gamut from professional to personal???

i previously had a blog post explaining that i didn’t really get Twitter and the attention it was receiving. well, that was before i had played with Twitter enough to start seeing some of the application potential it contained. i am rapidly enjoying my Twitter account. let me explain how i use it and how it’s becoming helpful to me. first, i am making it a point to only follow people who i think i can benefit from following. so, as people start following me, i don’t automatically start following them. and folks who i follow who dominate the my feed with tweets might get dropped as well if their tweets aren’t of use to me. i control who appears in my feed so i might as well cater it to what i want and that’s largely ed tech related content. little life updates (e.g., “am thinking of grabbing some lunch”) is a quick way to get removed from my feed. i also won’t post that kind of meaningless stuff either. so, i have tweets coming in that direct me to new ways to use particular software or tools (e.g., Drupal) or direct me to a helpful web 2.0 tool or news item. that’s great. unlike an RSS feed from blogs, the tweets are short and succinct and i can scan through bunches in no time at all and then just choose the most interesting to follow up on. good stuff.

but the real benefit of Twitter occurred this week. my wife was using Blackboard 9th generation, which is the latest version of Blackboard — perhaps in beta. Our university upgraded this spring/summer and I think we’re beta testers. i barely use Blackboard, but my wife relies on it pretty extensively. she had a class discussion set up and went to use Firefox to view student posts. something was way off and the current student’s post was appearing as text written over the list of responses. so, she couldn’t really read the overlapping text and she also couldn’t click on many of the discussion responses. she quit Firefox and switched to Safari yet the problem persisted and she still couldn’t participate. the next morning things were looking better but the the problem was still slightly apparent, so i took a screen shot. i posted the problem and then the screen shot to Twitter in a series of tweets. immediately, IT at my university who is following me responded and an email follow up came to me as well as many other IT folks. at the same time, engineers from Blackboard also responded almost immediately. interestingly, the guy from Blackboard noted that i had posted a screen shot that also contained student names. i was so blinded by the error that i wasn’t even paying attention to what was beneath the overlapping text. here’s a bit of the screen shot i posted; however, i had failed to blur the student names in the tweet:

Blackboard error - students blurred

i was able to immediately take the picture down and get things fixed (as i’ve done above with the student names blurred). i’ve now had follow up discussions with my university IT folks and the problem is being addressed. and the twitter exchanges happened within seconds at night. i have changed my mind on Twitter — it can be very useful. ;~)

okay, so wolframalpha is not a Google killer after all. heck, it’s not even a search engine; rather, it’s a “computational knowledge engine.” i spent some time playing with it today. it doesn’t know who i am even though Google has me #1 on their results page. fine, i am barely a blip on the internet radar and it’s not likely that anyone other than me will ever search for me. so instead i decided to see how Grand Rapids, Michigan compares to Seattle, WA in terms of annual cloudy days. i got nowhere with that. so i tried precipitation — again, not recognized. i then tried [ Grand Rapids, Seattle, rain ] and it gave me my two cities but also added the city, “Rain, Bavaria, Germany” instead. hmmm. i can apparently compare cities, but just not on my terms yet. that being said, the service does appear to be valuable if what you seek fits into their parameters. to get an idea of what those parameters are, check out their exmaples page: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/

so, i was on the IT Oversight Committee at my university for a number of years until this year. and about 2 years ago, i argued that we should be using Gmail instead of our current student email system. the discussion lasted just a few minutes and it seemed unatainable. well, come to find out . . . my university is moving all students over to a Gmail account starting later this summer. very cool. i wish i was still on the oversight committee so i could see how the decision was made, but the fact that it was made is encouraging to me. from my perspective, i would think that most k-12 schools would be wise to switch to Gmail for student and even teacher and staff email accounts. 2.5 GB of free space is quite a bit. students could store all papers in their Gmail account quite easily. they also allow attachments to be sent that are to 25 MB to accommodate about anything students would be sending teachers. You can turn on Tasks to have a decent To Do list, etc. uptime is great and students can keep their accounts as they make the transition away from school. now if i could just get the powers that be to move the faculty accounts away from Groupwise and over to Gmail then i’d be quite happy.

so, i installed a plugin that should automatically post a tweet to my twitter account each time i post a blog entry. it’s call Twitter SP2. all setting stuff is in another language but it’s not hard to figure out what it means. then again, i haven’t tested it yet . . . And, it worked. neato.