HootCourse- twitter for online and face to face courses

As I mentioned about a month ago, along with experimenting with mobile learning in my course this summer, I also decided to test out HootCourse.  HootCourse is a Twitter tool that allows you to create courses, invite students, and automatically adds a hashtag for your course.  Like other Twitter tools, it performs a search based on the hashtag and keeps those tweets inside “your course.” In my testing, I was able to post inside HootCourse successfully, and I was able to post inside Tweetdeck and Twitterific if I added my course’s hashtag. Over at the “Free Technology for Teachers” blog, Thomas, one of the developers for HootCourse, explains in the comments a little more about the public v. private versions of HootCourse.

You can see in the screen shots below, that my course hashtag was #idt7064.  Hootcourse automatically added this.  I had to add this inside Tweetdeck (on my desktop) and Twitterific (on my iPod Touch and iPad).  Because Hootcourse is automatically adding the hashtag, it goes ahead and subtracts the number of characters in your hashtag from your 140-limit for Twitter.

I really liked being able to retweet posts and share these with my students directly from Tweetdeck and Twitterific.  In addition to being able to tweet inside HootCourse, you can also write longer posts — beyond the 140-word-limit — and these will post to a blog.  With only a small amount of difficulty and a quick email out to support, I was able to connect my HootCourse account to my own Wordpress (Viral-Notebook) instead of the suggested Wordpress.com account.  (I also found out from the tech support that this feature had been enabled by one of the developers, but the other didn’t know it. ) So, longer posts can go into my blog and then tweeted.  In Derek Bruff’s blog you can see where he did just this (and explains a number of features too), and this is a test post that I used as well.  I found that I didn’t use this feature very much for my online course that I was teaching.  But, I’m interested to figure out whether I might do this in a standard 15-week course with a little more forethought and planning.

The last feature that I’m interested in trying out connects nicely to Dr. Rankin’s Twitter experiment in her large class.  This is a classroom version of Twitter for face-to-face discussions.  In essence, it’s creating a backchannel for your classroom.  You can see from the screenshot below that HootCourse sort of strips down everything and makes the posts large so you could project these during a lecture of classroom discussion.  I didn’t use this feature in my online course, but I’m interested in trying this with some face-t0-face courses to see how it might work.

There are a number of folks testing out HootCourse right now, but I haven’t seen many reviews or posts of actual implementations.  So, I hope some folks come out with those.  Are you using HootCourse?  How’s it going?  Are you doing it online or face-t0-face or both?

It’s finally happened…to me

I’m excited to say that it’s finally happened to me.  Today, one of my presentations, “Comparing Instructional Design Models,” made it to the home page of Slideshare — even it was only for a little while.  Earlier today, I received the following email:

Unfortunately, I missed capturing the link on Slideshare’s homepage.  But I have to say that I am “Wowed!”  I heard all this today from a colleague and friend Kevin Thorn, who said he saw one of my presentations get tweeted.  So that’s pretty cool.  Somebody I don’t know (that’s Mike Taylor) found one of my presentations and decided to share it.  That’s awesome!  Glad I could help.  Since this was new to me, I decided to search twitter to see if I could find out who all were interested in my presentation today.  And I found this:

Now, I am pleased to say that my friend Kevin (that’s him above as LearnNuggets) retweeted the original tweet, and then it got retweeted multiple times.  The folks who retweeted the presentation include folks that I admire and follow myself, such as Cammy Bean at Kineo and Dr. Allison Rossett at San Diego State.
So, what’s the stuff that caused this reaction?  It’s this presentation:

I decided this semester that I would publish all my slides for my “Developing Interactive Learning Environments” course into Slideshare just to see what happens.  I guess I got my answer.

534 views.
5 favs.
2 embeds other than me.

So, why has this presentation resonated with others?  What did you like, dislike, or abhor about it? Thanks everybody for making me feel appreciated today.

400 friends? Confirm or ignore?

I recently had a facebook friend post a celebratory post about reaching 400 friends. Of course, comments of congratulations followed this. However, I could not help but wonder how many of the people he would recognize or speak to if he met them on the street?

A recent blog posted by Dion Hinchcliffe lists the twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy. I found it interesting that number 3 was Dunbar’s Law that states we can only have 150 active connections. With more than 10 social networking options available, I think of people who have more than 150 connections on each network. For example, on my LinkedIn network, I only have four connections with two group memberships.

So, how many connections do I need? Personally, I have 148 friends in Facebook. In September, Wired published an article explaining where you could purchase Facebook and Twitter friends. Most of my connections are personal connections made through education and church settings. However, I did use my friends list recently to distribute a survey for a course. Because of their feedback, I was able to focus the instructional design of my unit.

The Facebook Song seems to summarize the feelings of the growing population of social networkers. With the number of social networking sites and connections increasing, are social interaction skills beginning to suffer? I love the thought of being able to connect with high school friends or college friends. However, when you begin to suffer withdrawl symptoms because of lack of Facebook time, there is a greater problem.

• Have you suffered facebook or social networking with drawl?
• How many social networking connections do you have?
• How do you use these connections personally and professionally?

Guest blogger:  Jamae Allred is a former preschool teacher of six years. She enjoyed working with children from three to five years old. After completing her Masters of Science in Education in Early Childhood, she taught undergraduate early childhood courses for one year. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in instructional design & technology at the University of Memphis. Her research interests include online education and e-Learning influences in the early childhood arena. She plans to teach in higher education after completing her degree.

Icons I love. Fur and feathers.

I told you I would share some icon sets that I really love.  As a quick reminder, I only do free.  So all of these are free downloads.  Today, we’re starting with animals.  Lots of fur and feathers.  Here’s a few sets that I think are super well done and are super easy to use.  These will work in Word, Powerpoint, or on the Web.  Two of these come with the original files, so you can edit them into what you need.  Go on and download.  Nobody’s watching.

Cute Critters

These adorable animals are “painfully cute” as described on the release.  A little heavy on the anime, all of these guys have caricatured features.  So something’s a little larger than everything else.  They are indeed cute, and they well done.  The set comes with two versions of each critter—one with the graduated single color background and one with a transparent background. They can be used in commercial and personal project without attribution, but that’s just not nice.  So go ahead and tell everybody where you got them from.

Available from Tutorial9.com

Birds 1

These cute little birds are one set of friends that could be used with Twitter or stand alone.  They are really friendly and round, so they would be great with K-12 kids, teachers, or even with newsletters.  There are a total of 8 images, even though only 5 are in the image at the right.  With these icons, you’re going to get the vector Illustrator (.ai) file for editing, along with EPS files.  So, these certainly have the potential to be used with print materials.  You also get the PNG files in three sizes (128, 256, & 512).  So they could be used as dominate images on slides or a web page.

Available from Mirkku

Birds 2

I used a screen capture of these Twitter birds in my last post on icons.  But I thought I would go ahead and given you a heads up on the full set.  There are 5 different birds with this set, and they each have fun names, like Roger, Nola, and Squidge.  For each character, you’re going to get your money’s worth, though.  You’ll get a Twitter badge, like the one to the right  You’ll get icons (PNGs) at a couple of different sizes.  You’ll be getting larger images, just silhouettes, and Photoshop (.psd) files for each character.  There’s 40 images in all.  So, this is well worth the download.  Because these birds are all whimsical, these are fun to use with less-than-serious topics, and they have really nice unity among the images to be used across design project.  The colors are a little muted, and there is a range of different colors.  So, lots of possibilities and play in the color schemes that could be used.  Plus, the licensing on these is pretty wide open, too.  A link back is appreciated but not required.

Available from Function Web Design

That’s it for today.  Three fun, cute, and furry or feather sets of icons for you to download and put to good —or no good— use.  Do you have some icons that you like?  Let me know what you like and where to get ‘em down in the comments.

Bookmarks for September 8th

These are my Jumptags for September 8th

• The Five Design Elements Every Website Needs – Discover the five design elements that every well-built website needs. Includes tips and tricks for content and navigation design.
• How To Jump Start The Website Design Process – Discover a simple four-step process that can help any web designer squeeze inspiration out of a competitor's website design.
• Project2Manage – Free Project Management – Project2Manage is an Online project management system that allows you to stay up-to-date, on task and connected with your team. We’ve taken the hard work of staying organized and simplified it for you.
• 15 Essential Web Tools for Students – It's time to head back to school and there are a number of web-based and social tools to help you get through the school year. Here are 15 essential ones.
• Microsoft Launches Tools For Teachers – Microsoft's Education Labs launched a new project this afternoon and it's better on trees and the environment. The group just announced a new Math Worksheet Generator where teachers …
• Kineo – Tip 27: Tear down the visual wallpaper – It is time to tear down the e-learning wallpaper and take heed of some top tips on using graphics for instructional use.
• 30 Amazing Alphabet Recreations | Tutorial9 – The Alphabet dates back to the Egyptian era and forms the basis of our language, through the years people have experimented and created a wealth of interesting and unique alphabets. This is a collection of some of the best examples.
• 3 Successful Small Businesses on Social Media – To help you see how social media can work no matter how big or small your business, I’ve found some great case studies of small businesses that get it and are seeing results!

Bookmarks for September 4th

These are my Jumptags for September 4th

• GIF, PNG, JPG. Which One To Use? – If you're starting out in web design, you may be familiar with the different types of file formats used for images, but it can be confusing trying to figure out which file type you should use.
• The Ultimate Round-Up of Fireworks Tutorials and Resources – Fireworks was originally created as an image editing and web design application by Macromedia, for quick web mock-ups, and optimizing images for the Web. It
• Social Media Network Icons – Over 80 refined, amazing social networking icons for the top networks around. In PNG format.
• How to Use Twitter for Business: An Official Guide Finally Arrives – ReadWriteEnterprise – Twitter has launched Twitter 101, a special guide to the 140-character network aimed businesses.
• The Big Picture – The Big Picture is an online organizer that sets to make organizing more intuitive.
• 25-point Website Usability Checklist – Use this simple, 25-point checklist to assess critical website usability issues. Includes free download (1-page PDF).
• Download Helveticons – A great set of free folder icons based on Helvetica Bold.

Ownership of knowledge: To whom or for whom do you attribute ?

Something’s been bugging me a lot lately:  I’ve been thinking about “indirect objects,” retweets, and reposts.  Huh? Indirect objects?  You know, indirect objects from 10th grade English grammar class.  They are the “to whom or for who the action is being done.”  They usually come at the end of a sentence.  It’s usually how you can tell whether you’re supposed to use the word who or whom.  And what do they have to do with retweets and reposts?  Here it is:  When someone retweets or reposts a whole post, a massive chunk of a post, or even writes two lines to preface a video, is that ethical?  To whom or for whom will others attribute the ideas?  Are they in some way attempting to leverage someone else’s knowledge and works for their own acclaim or profit or notoriety?  Let me give you a few examples of things that have begun to bother me.

Probably eight to ten months ago, I received an email for an RSS feed from a Diigo group that I subscribe to.  In the email digest, someone had bookmarked and annotated a blog post of which a portion of the blog post was some text I had written.  (Admittedly, this sort of thing where someone actually reads and bookmarks something of mine  everyday, so I happen to notice that the text sounded rather familiar.)  In the annotation, the individual attributed the ideas and point of view to the blog owner instead of to me.  Yes, I had given the blog owner permission to use the text, and he had used my name in the attribution to the post. But the individual who bookmarked it, did not really see the idea as mine.

Also, I read RSS feeds from a lot of places.  In a couple of feeds, I’ve read notes from a presentation.  Someone sitting in the audience is taking notes and then publishes the notes on his or her blog…usually along with the link to the presentation.  If it were my presentation, I’m sure I’d be flattered that someone wanted to publish my ideas.  But here’s where I start to question it.  If they are more well known than I am, have a larger Twitter following, or more subscribers to their blog, then they will receive the hits and acclaim for my ideas through their publishing outlet.  Did I as the presenter just lose some control of my ideas?  By allowing someone else to publish (or even republish) my ideas, did I just give away a portion of my ownership — or even copyrights?

So, my question is, at what point do you lose control of your ideas when they are so easily published and republishable by others? Coming from publishing background, I certainly understand that ideas can be usurped by anyone.  For an intense example, consider the swastika.   I also certainly understand that those individuals with an audience are the ones able to promote ideas.  This have been going on forever with magazines and TV.  But in this “age” or citizen journalism, where anyone should be able to promote their ideas, and “the flat world,” where playing fields have supposedly been leveled, are ideas and knowledge just easier to be misrepresented?

I’m not even talking about embed codes here.  I understand that social media have changed the way we view marketing and celebrity.  Retweets, Delicious, Digg, authority on Technorati—sure these represent new methods to determine authority, value, and credibility.  But what I’m wondering is much more basic and personal.  What are the ethics or netiqette to re-publishing or mashing up others’ ideas?  This is more than just attribution.  Copyright and fair use really doesn’t seem to cover this.  What do you think?

[In an effort of full disclosure, image courtesy of Pasquale D’Silva and Function Web Design & Development .]