Thursday 14 February 2008

Twitter plug-in stage 1 complete


Twitter is one of those services that people either seem to love or 'don't know what it's for'. Rather like the camera phone when it first came out. The combination of the instant message feel with the attributes of a blog could be potentially very useful. In terms of usability there is both the immediacy of SMS and IM combined with a history or diary quality of a blog. The Twitter service has small messages which are small enough to send as SMS, use as with a Java Applet on a mobile device, widgets, Facebook, Second Life, or any number of other ways. Maybe Twitter could bridge communities as well as technologies?

Other aspects of Twitter that could be interesting are; that the service is lightweight enough to hopefully not deter people from contribution, maybe in a similar way to SMS; and that Twitter may offer the beginnings of another way to blend learning between SL and a VLE.

Where are we at the moment with the plug-in?

We've created two portlets; one that shows the updates for a particular Twitterer and another that allows you to post your tweets to the Twitter service. Testing has been going on all week in our version of Moodle, both with a test course and also with a clone of the course that we want to use. If you're interested in participation then please contact me.


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Tuesday 12 February 2008

Second Life student orientation

I've been scouting around for orientation places for students in Second Life outside of the usual location. A likely candidate looks to be the New Media Consortium service that allows you to register via their website, and then to be able to access their orientation centre. From the website, it looks a nice job though I would like to be able to see it for myself. Might possibly need to meet our students in-world, particularly those abroad. Using the orientation centre to undertake a few related teaching activities, should help form a group faster and also speed up the learning process. I'll have to check with NMC is that's allowed first.


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Twitter plugin is undergoing testing

The portlets are currently being tested in Moodle. As Twitter is such a simple service to use, we're not having an issues with a technological learning curve. It will interesting, however, to be able to try out specific uses of Twitter with students and the rest of the Emerge community.

Talking of testing, I'm still having trouble with Twitterscreen, which doesn't seem to want to respond to commands and is steadfastly refusing to display video at the moment. Again!

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Tuesday 5 February 2008

Twitter Moodle plug-in version 1

The first version of the Twitter plug-in for Moodle is ready for installation this week. We will be trialling it with a pilot group of volunteers initially before we run our first course using the service in April.

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