Live Content in Canvas: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, more

So, after a bumpy start (Canvas rejects Twitter widgets), I finally got a good set of dynamic content pages set up in my practice Canvas course. I made it public, so this link will take you there: Growth Mindset Playground. I found a hack to make the Twitter work after all (weird, but functional), plus it's easy to do YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, Blogger, and (my personal favorite!) Inoreader.

I don't really have any interest in using Canvas for a "course," and I don't have any interest in creating content in there, but these live content pages are different. Instead of creating content inside Canvas (I far prefer other publishing platforms), I am creating and curating content in real spaces on the Internet, and that content is then automatically displayed in Canvas. I don't have to do anything: it's automatic!

So, when I use Twitter, the tweets show up in Canvas. When I add a new video to the YouTube playlist, the playlist is updated. When I add new images to the Flickr album, they show up in Canvas. When I bookmark with Diigo, it's in Canvas. New Blogger blog post? It's in Canvas. New RSS items? Inoreader will display them in Canvas, along with other social network content, including Google+ and Facebook.

Some other formats I tried did not work because Canvas rejects javascript. That is frustrating (one of the main reasons I like Blogger is that it is very javascript-friendly), but I'm still very pleased with the live content sources that do work! And, of course, I am very happy that I can make the course pages public so that everybody can see how it works and decide what might be useful for their own Canvas courses.

Why live content?

To me, live content is something extremely important to include in an online course. Using live pages, you give the students a steady stream of new content to explore. This might be content that the instructor(s) create/curate, or you can have the students also participate in creating and/or curating the content as well. It all depends on the goals you have for your course!

In future posts, I'll have more to say about these specific content sources and also about content creation and curation. For now, though, I am really happy that I was able to get all this live content up and running. Even better: I am so glad to be able to share the pages with everybody... that was never possible in D2L!

Twitter Bootcamp: Resource for #HumanMOOC

The Week 2 topic for #HumanMOOC is social presence and community building. There's been some great social present via the #HumanMOOC hashtag at Twitter, so I wanted to offer as a resource to share for Week 2 the TWITTER BOOTCAMP that I am working on right now for a January Academic Technology Expo at my school. I hope the materials and activities can be useful to people who have never used Twitter before and even for people who use it a lot. I use Twitter a lot, and I am also learning new things all the time from other users.

So... if you have never used Twitter or have a dormant Twitter account, you might find the Bootcamp useful in developing a fun and productive Twitter presence in conjunction with #HumanMOOC. The materials go step by step, starting with the basics of Twitter (Stage 1 and Stage 2), some recommended tools and add-ons (Stage 3), and then a Twitter project — building a Twitter widget for your LMS or blog (Stage 4). You can contact me with any questions you have (@OnlineCrsLady), and you can also ask your #HumanMOOC Twitter Buddies (see below for more information about that Twitter list).

And... if you are a regular user of Twitter, you might find some new tips and tools in the Bootcamp materials. Even better, you could help me out by sharing YOUR favorite tips and tools, the key ingredients that have made Twitter a useful social learning space for you. Please comment anywhere with your input — the Bootcamp takes the form of a blog so you can comment on the posts there, or you can comment at this blog post, or at Twitter!

#OUTechExpo AND #HumanMOOC. The materials have a University-of-Oklahoma focus (that's where I work), and they are designed for our Technology Expo in January, so that's the #OUTechExpo hashtag that you will see mentioned.  Yet I am sure we could make good use of these materials for #HumanMOOC also — just jiggle the instructions in your mind, substituting #HumanMOOC for #OUTechExpo.

WILL YOU BE A BUDDY? If you are already using Twitter, you could help others in #HumanMOOC to get started in using Twitter and building their personal learning network. I'm making a list of Twitter Buddies for #HumanMOOC, and if you would like me to add your name to that list, that would be super! Being a "Twitter buddy" should not be much work; it's really just about being willing to follow people while they are getting started, replying to their tweets, sharing ideas, and answering questions. You can see the growing list of HumanMOOC Twitter Buddies below.

And THANKS in advance for any feedback people might have about the Bootcamp materials. All 40 posts are done, more or less (I just finished a couple of days ago on the first drafts for them all), and I am working hard on polishing them in time for my school's Expo in January. Some of the posts are in pretty good shape, and some still have gaps. Let me know if there is anything at all that is not clear or not working, and I'll try to be quick to fix it!

Meanwhile, I use Twitter every day and it's an invaluable tool for my own learning and also for my teaching. I hope it's something that can be useful for you too!

(see full-sized graphic at TeachThought)

BUDDIES WIDGET. Below is a widget with the #HumanMOOC Twitter Buddies list. The widget shows their most recent tweets; here is the Members list. Want to be a Twitter Buddy? Just let me know (@OnlineCrsLady).

Notice that this list is not just people's #HumanMOOC tweets; instead, the widget displays all their tweets (except for replies). That way you can see how people are using Twitter not just for the course experience, but in other ways too!

---

Tweets from https://twitter.com/OnlineCrsLady/lists/humanmooc-buddies

---

Twitter Heart Debacle

I don't have much to say about the Twitter hearts except ... NOOOOOOOO!!!

Luckily, the StarBack app came to my rescue: one of the many reasons I prefer browsers to apps. I have more control, thanks to the genius extension-writers. Thank you, StarBack! I learned about the extension in Wired: Fear Not: You Can Use Chrome to Bring Stars Back to Twitter.

And here are some of the most humorous tweets on the subject IMO:

Bring a D2L Homepage to Life with a Twitter Widget

Thanks to an inquiry from Tassie Hirschfeld (OU Anthropology), I wanted to explain the way I use Twitter to share announcements and fun/useful stuff with my classes via a Twitter widget in my D2L homepage.

My Class Twitter Stream

So, first things first: my Twitter handle is @OnlineCrsLady and my class Twitter is @OnlineMythIndia. To get a sense of the kinds of content I share with my students, take a look through the class stream. Some days I share more than other days, but I usually have good stuff to share every day, and it takes only a few minutes. It's all about retweeting: I'm just sharing other people's Twitter content! I share lots of items related to the University of Oklahoma, and I also share artwork, music, and books from the Twitter feeds I follow with my class account.

So, how do students see the stream? A few of them follow the class stream at Twitter, but most of my students are not Twitter users (alas! I wish they were; we could have even more fun that way). Yet even though my students are not Twitter users, the students still see the Twitter class stream ... thanks to the power of Twitter widget. Twitter widgets allow you to share Twitter content (a stream, a hashtag, etc.) by displaying the Twitter content inside other websites. For example, you can see the Twitter widget for OnlineMythIndia in the sidebar here: Class Announcements blog.

Twitter Stream Inside D2L

Here's a screenshot of a course homepage in D2L. As you can see, I have some static text (important links) on the left, and the dynamic Twitter widget on the right. It changes all day long as I tweet and retweet:

This is so easy to do! Here's how it works:

Step One. Create a Twitter widget. Here are the instructions I share with my students. (Those instructions also explain how to add the Twitter widget to a Blogger blog, which is what my students do with their Twitter widgets.)

Step Two. Create a D2L Twitter Widget. To create a new D2L widget, click on Edit Course, and then choose Widgets. Click Create Widget and give your widget a name. Click on the Content tab to add the Twitter widget code you copied from the Twitter widget page. You need to switch to HTML mode by clicking on the <> icon in the lower right-hand corner, paste the Twitter widget code into the popup box, then save, and then save the widget. You can preview the widget to make sure it is working.
Update: For detailed instructions with lots of screenshots, see: D2L - Add A Twitter Feed.

Step Three. Add Twitter Widget to D2L Homepage. To add your widget to your D2L homepage, go to Edit Course, and then click Homepages. Next, click on your homepage to edit it, click Add Widgets, and then add the widget you created. Save your homepage, and your homepage is now alive with Twitter!

Reasons to Use Twitter for Class Content

For the rest of this post, I'll share some of the reasons why I love using Twitter for class announcements, along with some tips and strategies. My approach is admittedly idiosyncratic, having to do with the classes I teach and the kinds of online content that I enjoy... but, mutatis mutandis, some of the things that work for me would probably work for others too!

1. Fresh content. I can always find fresh new content all day, every day. I follow OU faculty and OU programs already (it's the main way I keep up with news at my school), and I find lots of tweets to share that way. It's also fun to keep an eye on the museums and other streams I follow with the class account; there's always something new worth sharing whenever I look. I am especially lucky because the courses I teach have a lot of overlap (Indian Epics can be considered a subset of Myth-Folklore), so that means I can use the same stream for both classes. Hence the name of the stream: OnlineMythIndia.

2. Lots of images. Images are good for the brain! My favorite Twitter content to share consists of images: paintings, posters, cartoons, etc. I ask my students to read and write a lot, but I also want them to see and enjoy all kinds of images. I especially like the clear, intriguing way that the image thumbnails are displayed in the Twitter widget; to me, the thumbnails are very attention-getting, and I hope they can be attention-getting for my students to.

3. Videos too! Twitter is very video-friendly! For example, when you include a YouTube video link in a tweet, there is an embedded player so that the video will play right there in the tweet. The video will even play right there inside D2L inside the embedded widget: no kidding! Here's a screenshot of Maati Baani's Funky Pawa... and you can listen for yourselves here at the tweet. It's hard to see in the screenshot but the video is playing: instant music!

(screenshot is from different homepage layout last year)

(I adore Maati Baani, and I actually had a Twitter back-and-forth with them this semester: I was so thrilled to be in touch with them virtually!!!) 

4. Easy to manage. Two accounts are easy to manage with two browsers. There are lots of tools out there for managing multiple Twitter accounts, but the trick that works best for me is to be logged in to my own Twitter account in Chrome, the browser I use almost all the time. Meanwhile, I am logged in to my class account with Firefox. To share a tweet I see in Chrome over in Firefox, I just copy-and-paste the URL of the tweet (click on the time-date stamp of the tweet to get the URL) into the Firefox browser bar, and then I can reshare the tweet.

5. Hashtags. I love hashtags! Searching by hashtags is a great way to find additional content, and it's also very useful to add hashtags to your own retweets. To do that, you need the Classic Retweet Extension (available for both Chrome and Firefox). It's called Classic Retweet because Twitter used to allow editing of retweets; it's kind of maddening that they took that great feature away, but Classic Retweet solves that problem!

6. Lists. Twitter lists are a great way to follow specific types of content. For example, as I mentioned above, I use lists to keep up with hundreds of OU faculty and programs. You can see the tips I give my students about Twitter lists here: Twitter lists.

7. Modeling digital literacy. I want to model digital literacy for students. Even though most of my students do not use Twitter, I am glad that they have seen someone using Twitter in a fun and effective way for professional and educational purposes. As a result, they know that it is possible to use Twitter this way!

8. Building online presence. Twitter is an important part of how I build my online presence. As someone who teaches fully online courses, I need an online presence that "shows" students who I am. The Twitter stream helps the students get to know me as they see the kinds of things I like and share.

9. Harvesting and archiving. Most Twitter content is ephemeral, but when I see Twitter content that I want to save for repeated use in the future, I save the tweet in the Pinterest Portfolio Board that I keep for each of my classes. To do that, I just open the tweet in its own window (right-mouse click on the time-date stamp to get the specific tweet as a URL), and then I pin the tweet. Here are my class Boards: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics. I like the way that the Pinterest Boards are accessible to my students too. Not all my students use Pinterest, but far more of them use Pinterest than use Twitter!

10. Twitter is ... fun!!!!! Having fun is one of my main goals for teaching and learning online, and I think Twitter is so much fun! When I need to take just a quick break from work, Twitter is the perfect option. My main hangout online is Google+, but I can get seriously lost in there, writing long posts, getting involved in long discussions. The way I use Twitter is very different: ephemeral, fun, fast. It never takes up much of my time, but it manages to pack a lot of pleasure into that small amount of time!

So, those are some of my Twitter tips and tricks. Do you have any to share? Comment here at the blog or at Twitter (I'm @OnlineCrsLady). Twitter is so flexible and can be used in so many ways, and I keep learning new tips and tricks all the time! :-)

Thoughts about SUSTAINABILITY for this week's chat

Gearing up for our #OpenTeachingOU Twitter chat on SUSTAINABILITY tomorrow morning (Friday, March 27 - details), I wanted to write up some quick thoughts about concepts and questions that come to my mind as I think about sustainability.

My guess is that when most people think about sustainability in the context of education, it is at an institutional or program level, which makes perfect sense. Sometimes sustainability is even just shorthand for costs, revenue streams, income, business models, etc.

In our chat, though, I hope we can broaden that out to think about sustainability on all levels, big and small, institutional and personal, going beyond just business models. Rather than an implicit or explicit business model, I'd like to appeal to an ecological model.

If you look at the Wikipedia article on Sustainability, here is how it opens: "In ecology, sustainability is how biological systems remain diverse and productive."

Diverse.

Productive.

As a teacher, those are concepts that resonate with me in a very powerful way, much more so than talking about just economic sustainability, although obviously the economy is part of the big picture in ecology just as it is in education.

So, if you have a few moments, I'd urge you to take a look at that Wikipedia article; it is very clear, very informative, and full of all kinds of concepts we can use to extend our thinking! For example, just look at this nifty Venn diagram which I found there:

In terms of education, thinking about our educational "environment" is a good way to ponder all the RESOURCES that we need to do our work. Everything that we do as learners and as teachers will require resources... and if we want to be able to carry on with our work, whatever our work might be is, those resources must be sustainable. That is, they need to exist in an abundant supply and/or they need to be renewable. Ideally, the resources would be renewable as a natural part of our workflow!

So, for example, there is the personal ENERGY we need just to do what we do and to keep on doing it. If we don't have enough energy, our work will suffer. We are at risk of burn-out.

Another crucial resource is TIME. I would guess that finding enough time to do our work and keep on doing it is  one of the biggest challenges of all. I know it is a challenge for me, and I can tell that it is an even bigger challenge for my students.

There are also MATERIALS that we might need. That can be content, or it might be tools, along with the spaces (physical or digital) in which we do our work.

On a systems level, we need FEEDBACK so that we can monitor and improve the system. I need detailed, reliable data to make strategic decisions about how to use all available resources.

Also on a systems level, we need to think about processes and strategies. For example: REUSE. The more reuse I can get out of anything — reuse of my work, reuse of my students' work, reuse of other people's work, etc. — the more productive and sustainable my courses will become.

As someone who has been teaching the same online courses for over 10 years, I have thought A LOT about these topics on a micro-scale (i.e. at the course-level, in terms of what the students and I are doing), and I have been constantly improving my courses to make them more productive, more resilient, etc. My goal is to design courses that are sustainable and sustaining for both me and for the students.

So... just for fun, I decided to use HTML5 Word Clouds to make a word cloud of the ideas on my mind here, a sort of snapshot of what I think about when I think about sustainability in education:

I've tried to brainstorm some questions that reflect these ideas, and if you have ideas for questions to help propel our chat on Friday, that would be super - let me know here at the planning post or here at the GoogleDoc.

And I'll see everybody on Friday, 9AM, Norman time. :-)

Thoughts on Content Development and Curation for the New Year!

The past couple of years have been a BIG transition for me in terms of my content/curation habits, so before 2015 is upon us, I wanted to share some thoughts about that.

Latin Days Officially Over. For about 10 years, I spent most of my content development time on Latin. That was partly because I had some projects related to fables and proverbs that were really important to me personally, but it was also because I hoped that I could persuade my school to let me develop an online Latin course. Those hopes led nowhere, unfortunately; the Classics department really has stuck to the vow made by the department chair back in 2001 that "Laura Gibbs will never teach Latin in this department again!" (after I resigned my job as a professor there); the departmental resentment has not lessened over the years, even though that department chair is long since retired. Over the course of those years, I wrote five books for Latin students and teachers: one book I did for a traditional publisher, but the other four books I self-published so that I could give them away for free.

You can read about my book-writing process here; it was very much a combination of content development and curation interwoven: Websites, Blogs, and Books. I also created a long-running blog and built up a big readership there: Bestiaria Latina. The blog is the one Latin project that I have kept up with, but I'm no longer doing any new Latn content development (just the occasional new Latin LOLCat) — instead, I recycle the thousands of proverbs and fables that I worked on in those years, reusing them there at the blog.

It was a really hard decision to give up the Latin but finally, two years ago, I did give it up. I was a bit adrift for a while, doing some work on English proverbs, but not really sure which way to go. Then, I came up with the idea of redoing my Myth-Folklore class with the UnTextbook, and that has led to a fabulous new phase of content development that should easily last as long as my Latin phase... or even longer! Plus, I learned a lot from all the Latin work that I did which has let me make really fast progress, learning from old mistakes as I start these new projects.

New Projects, New Tools. Another thing that has happened over the past decade is the explosion of new tools to help me do a better job with all my content development and curation. When I did my first Latin proverb book back in 2005, I had GoogleDocs to help me (spreadsheets rule my world!), and I had just started blogging, but I did not have the amazing digital libraries online that I do now; all my current projects are powered by online libraries like Internet Archive and Hathi Trust. Most important of all, I am now involved in some great social networks online, so that I no longer feel like I am working all alone. It's ironic: when I lived in Norman (where the University of Oklahoma is located) I actually felt far more alone and isolated than I do now, when I am living over a thousand miles away from Oklahoma in very rural North Carolina, but connected to so many inspiring and helpful colleagues online at Google+ and other social networking sites.

Re-Use and Wider Audiences. Luckily for me, it is very easy to repurpose the kinds of content I create (fables, proverbs, etc.) because the content comes in such small pieces! By re-using that content in different spaces (Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc.), I am able to reach more people. In addition, that process enables me to curate the content at the same time, correcting errors, adding links, and so on. Over the years, I've learned some really good tricks for keeping track of what content I've used and where I've used it. The main way I do that is with Blogger blog post labels, since Blogger has turned out to be my main content hub. Blogger is where I create new content and then, as time goes by, I update and republish that content while also sharing it again in whatever social networking spaces I am participating in. For 2015, it looks like those spaces are going to be Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest. I like the fact that I can use these different spaces to reach different audiences. Google+ is where I reach my own colleagues online, while Pinterest and Twitter are good ways to reach my students, connect with my school (that's why I started using Twitter), and also encounter complete strangers — Pinterest is really a new world for me that way!

Plans for 2015. My main content development project for 2015 is the upcoming Indian Epics UnTextbook, which will occupy the summer. By having decided on my summer project already, I can get my students this spring to help me find the right materials to focus on. So, I am busily seeking out new India-related books for the students to browse and comment on (growing list of books here), and I am also starting to post some Indian stories at a new blog: Ocean of Stories. Plus, just for fun, I am also doing a Doctor Who project: Doctor Who Quotes.

In terms of content re-use for the coming year, I will be republishing one of my LatinLOLCats every day at the Proverb Laboratory blog. I'm also trying to make better use of the images at my Indian Epics Resources blog by republishing those images and sharing them via both Pinterest and the Twitter stream for Indian Epics. Another re-use project is revisiting the free Kindle books that I originally collected to use in my Class Announcements two years ago; now I'm updating those Kindle book listings with additional bibliographical information based on the availability of the books at digital libraries like Internet Archive and Hathi Trust. These public domain online books are the engine that will be driving all my content development in future years, so I'm excited about revisiting these free Kindle books as a way to refocus and then expand my digital bibliography efforts.

The Evils of the LMS. As you can see, I have not even mentioned the LMS that I am supposed to be using for sharing content with my students (we use D2L BS at my school). From my perspective, the LMS is the worst possible content repository that I can think of: to put content in D2L would be like nailing it inside a coffin and then burying that coffin deep in the digital ground. Ugh. Sadly, as long as my school keeps promoting the LMS while failing to promote other kinds of tools for content development, sharing, and re-use, we are — in my opinion anyway — failing in our mission as a PUBLIC university.

So, I'm expecting great things for my own content efforts in 2015, but will we see any change at my school in terms of faculty and students breaking out of the LMS and taking advantage of the open Internet for connecting and sharing...? Sadly, I doubt it. But Jim Groom is coming to give a keynote address at the University of Oklahoma's January Academic Tech conference — and that's something I wish I were in Norman to see! If anybody can shake things up, it would be Jim Groom... so maybe he will manage to shake loose some of the cobwebs and help us break out of the darkness into the light. What a great 2015 that would be!

I'll include here the video of my favorite session from Connected Courses which features Jim Groom, along with other folks who have great ideas and energy to share about using the web as our shared educational space: Connecting to the IndieWeb Movement.

Happy reading and watching in the New Year, everybody! :-)

Online Presence: Better than Video

I've been thinking a lot about online presence lately, both instructor presence in an online course and also student presence. And when I start thinking about something a lot, well, I end up with a lot to say. So this will probably be the first in a series of posts on this top. In this post, I'll focus on instructor presence and exactly how I create an online presence for the courses that I teach online.

I'll start with this contention: online presence — both instructor presence and student presence — is the single most important element in online course design. I know that is true for my courses... and I would be curious to know what other online instructors think about that!

And here's a thought I recently had: the current obsession with talking-head video is an attempt — a badly misguided attempt — to create online presence. Video, of course, is just content, and not even a particularly robust form of content for all kinds of reasons (more on that topic). A talking head video is NOT online presence.

So, while I've taken several MOOCs that included video, even abundant video, by the instructor, those videos did nothing to make the instructor seem really present. The latest Janux course I tried, for example, represents the most extreme case of that I have seen so far in the world of MOOCs: apparently the instructor listed for the course is not participating in any way at all, except insofar as they filmed her in some videos — last semester? last year? There's no telling. In any case, the videos are not new, which means they are not responsive to the class right now and not responsive to the students in that class.

Because that's what it's really about: online presence offers the responsiveness of a face-to-face encounter, while overcoming the F2F constraints of time and space. Online presence, unlike face-to-face, is asynchronous, persistent, re-usable, linkable, searchable, discoverable, all those Internet virtues... while also being directly responsive to a given class and the needs of the students in that class.

When I first started teaching online in 2002, there was only a very limited range of tools for developing online presence. Webpages (freestanding webpages, not blogs or wikis, etc.) were really about the only tool that I had available, but I published a lot of webpages... and my students did too! From the very semester that I taught online, student websites were the heart and soul of the class, and that continues to be true of my classes today.

Now, however, there is a whole wide range of tools available for creating an online presence ... more tools than I can even hope to take advantage of. So, for the remainder of this post, I will talk about some of the tools I am using this semester, all of which I am extremely happy with... some new, some old, ALL of them fun to use!

Daily Announcements Blog. This is probably the single most important focal point for my course-related web presence. There is a new announcement post every day (I queue them up a day or two in advance), with information about course assignments and activities, along with all kinds of other content just for fun and random discovery. I embed this blog page as the homepage for each of my courses in Desire2Learn, so there is something fresh there every day, no matter what day(s) of the week the students are logging in.

Class Twitter Feed. In addition to the daily announcements, throughout the day I am updating the Class Twitter Feed, so not only are there new things every day in the class announcements, there are new things throughout the day in the class Twitter feed. I am able to embed that feed in the Announcements blog, and the Twitter widget is highly responsive: you can tweet me from right there inside the widget.

Tagboard. For course-specific content, there are the #OU3043 and #OU4993 hashtags, and this allows students to contribute to the class feed also. Tagboard will be a really handy way to develop that shared hashtag presence: #OU3043 Tagboard and #OU4993 Tagboard. In Week 2 of the class, I am going to see if I can get students interested in trying this!

Pinterest Boards. This is my newest experiment. I got hooked on Pinterest last year for my own personal projects, and then I started seeing all kinds of ways in which I could use Pinterest for my classes too. So, the Pinterest Boards are another way that I am creating online presence and, as with Twitter, I am hoping this is something the students will join me in: Myth-Folklore Pinterest Portfolio and Indian Epics Pinterest Portfolio.

Now, those are the ways I create online presence related to my classes, which is in addition to the main ways in which I maintain an online presence, which is mostly at Google+ and in my non-class-related blogs, like the long-running Bestiaria. I also have a separate Twitter account, different from the class Twitter: I'm OnlineCrsLady.

Of these tools, Pinterest is the one that is the most new to me, so I still getting my "rhythm" with that one, but for the other tools - Announcements and Twitter - they are an automatic part of my daily routine, even more fundamental than email. My guess is that if faculty try to teach online with email and a learning management system as their only tools, they are probably not going to be able to create a highly dynamic and responsive online presence. Limited to email and an LMS, I would not be able to achieve my goals as a teacher online... but with tools like Blogger and Twitter, I believe I can create an online presence that is of greater and deeper value for my students than the ephemeral face-to-face conversation we would have for 150 minutes each week in a classroom.

So, those are my thoughts for today about online instructor presence. Next time, I will try to say something about student online presence, and hopefully I will have more to say about my Pinterest adventure too. Meanwhile, I've pasted in below screenshots of the Announcements, Twitter, Tagboard, and Pinterest just to give a quick visual impression of what they are like. They are pretty cool, very attention-getting!

Better than video...? I would say so.

Twitter

Tagboard

Pinterest

Announcements

Fall Diary, August 20: Day 3... tagboards!

Today was the bureaucratic day of Orientation Week, boring and not very exciting to write about. I only had a few students to track down who were no-shows, and there were students who dropped (which I anticipate... indeed, I count on it - I overenroll, knowing some will drop... but never knowing just how many), and then I was able to make the Blog Directory.

That means I will be able to set up the responding groups on Thursday, and I'm going to be trying to do a better job with that part of the classes this year. Given the chaotic nature of each week — where it's never sure just which students will do the blog posts and likewise which students will do the responding — I've decided not to try any longer to do groups that persist from week to week. Instead, I'll be doing new groups every week, and I should know on Thursday just who has posted a story for the week and who has not. During Orientation Week there will probably be some stragglers, but that's okay - I'll be putting everybody in groups tomorrow, and then, starting in Week 2, I'll be able to see who has published a story (grace period deadline at noon on Thursday), allowing me to base the groups on just who has published a story that week and who has not.

So, not the most exciting stuff... but I did manage to set up tagboards for the classes. That was fun! Here's the Myth-Folklore Board, and here's the Indian Epics Board. I think this could be really useful because if students also use the hashtags in their posts, it should all show up together.

And tagboard has an embed feature! Let's see how it looks!!!

Fall Diary, August 17: Class Twitter Widget

I had such a success with the Course Redesign Diary this summer that I am going to try to do something similar for the Fall semester, even if it is just a quick post or an embed of a Google+ post each day. Today is Sunday, August 17... the day before the official first start of classes. I've made so many changes to the classes this semester (some of them HUGE), so I will have plenty to write about here in my diary, but I wanted to start with something simple and powerful: the dedicated class Twitter stream. I've pasted it in below as a widget, and there is also a widget in the Class Announcements sidebar.

I'm been amazed at how incredibly easy it has been to integrate posting to this Twitter account a natural part of my day, with multiple items every day that just present themselves — either from my OU Twitter lists and/or my web browsing and/or class content creation. There have even been some tweets for student content creation, and I hope there will be more and more of these.

So, I guess all my time spent FINALLY learning how to make good use of Twitter has paid off. I am hoping this Twitter stream will be both fun and useful for the students. Obviously, it could have the best impact on students who already use Twitter, but thanks to the widget in the Class Announcements sidebar and my links to the Twitter stream in the announcements, it will be fun and useful to ALL the students in these classes!


OnlineMythIndia:

Tweets by @OnlineMythIndia

Post-Janux, 10 weeks till summer

Well, this blog took a bit of a hiatus, at first because I decided to participate in an open History of Science course offered by my university on their Janux platform, so my "free time" (note scare quotes, ha ha) was going to be dedicated to that course. After a few weeks, though, I realized that the poor quality of the software used for the course platform made it impossible for me to participate in the class; it just was not a good use of my time (details here). Last weekend, I got back into the groove of working on new materials for my students and thinking about better ways to use technology in my own courses. THAT is something exciting, unlike the Janux debacle.  So, I'm ready to start using this blog again as a way to record and reflect on those good technology adventures that are happening in my classes.

In this post, I'll provide an overview about the different kinds of stuff that I've got going on right now that I'm excited about. I'll do that in terms of the tools because those are the easiest to write about, but the reason I have chosen these tools is because I am thinking about curation and sharing a lot. I want to do a better job of curation and sharing in teaching my classes, and I also want to do a better job of helping my students see curation and sharing as a big part of what they can/should be doing as online learners.

• Pinterest. I continue to get more and more excited about how I can make Pinterest an important part of my classes. I'll save the details for a separate post, but last weekend I had a real breakthrough about using Pinterest as a kind of portfolio/diary tool for my classes, and I've started keeping a Myth-Folklore Pinterest Portfolio and an Indian Epics Pinterest Portfolio myself, while offering the Portfolio as an optional Tech Tip for my students this semester. My hope is to work on this over the summer and make Pinterest an integral part of my classes starting next fall. 
• Blogger. I've started the process of writing up Blogger Tech Tips now that will provide the core of student support materials as I transition from Ning to Blogger as the blogging platform for class next year. That is another huge change for my classes, but I am really getting excited about it because of the ways students will be able to customize their blogs, turning them into spaces of their own design, reflecting their own interests while also offering them a chance to develop their technical skills. I am glad that Blogger is javascript-friendly, which allows for good integration with other tools, like embedding Pinterest in a blog or embedding Twitter. 
• Diigo. My efforts to make better use of Diigo to facilitate exploration of the student archive of past projects has really paid off! I rewrote all my Week 2 and Week 3 project planning assignments to integrate more Diigo-tagged student projects from past classes, and also more Diigo-tagged online resources. The results were very positive! Overall, the project Introductions that students turned in for Week 4 were improved over past semesters. So, I now have a big incentive to make even better use of Diigo in the future. I used to keep a really clean, highly structured set of Delicious links; I got started using Diigo in a more haphazard way, but I can not see it is definitely worth my time to work on my Diigo library and be more systematic in my tagging. That will be a big part of my summer.
• Twitter. I continue to learn more about Twitter, and I am glad to discover that many of my students are already active Twitter users. I'm also learning that they are not necessarily adventurous Twitter users (they don't use lists, widgets, etc.), so I'm hoping that I can build some class activities that will both help students get started using Twitter as well as expanding the repertoire of students who are already using Twitter. So far, it appears that they are not using Twitter for school and do not think of it as an educational tool. I wonder if I will be able to change that...? Since my own uses for Twitter are educational and professional, I am hoping I can expand my students' use of Twitter into those realms also.

There's lots more I could write about, but I would say those are the big headers that describe what I have been up to over the past couple of weeks and which I am ready to start writing about again in this blog. 

It's funny: I was briefly paralyzed when I realized that the Ning would be gone next year, but thinking about how to adapt to that change has gotten me so energized! I spend most of my good "thinking time" right now (which, truth be told, is shower time for me - I get almost all my good ideas while taking a shower) thinking about what new things I might do with my classes next year! Exciting!

Here's a fun infographic on how teachers use Pinterest that someone shared over at Google+. For a full-sized view, see the EducatorsTechnology.com post:

Twitter Tip: Adding Yourself to a List

I'm not sure how often I'll be able to post in this blog as the semester gets started, but I had to look up a tip to remind myself how to do something at Twitter today - adding myself to my own Twitter list - so I thought I would write up a note here so that next time I'll know what I'm doing.

Lists are key to how I use Twitter; thanks to using lists of programs and people at my school, I've discovered that Twitter is a really useful addition to my daily routine. The lists can be shared, too, which I really like. But here's the thing: just using the regular Twitter interface, you cannot add yourself to a Twitter list. For my own viewing, of course, I don't need to be on my own lists, but because the lists are shared and can even be subscribed to, it makes sense to get myself on the list of people at my school. So, here's how to do that:

• Get a Tweetdeck.com account. (I probably should be using Tweetdeck anyway, but I just don't spend that much time at Twitter.)
• Log in at Tweetdeck, and then click the Lists button (near the bottom of the left-hand sidebar). Click on the list you want to work on, and then click the Edit button. 
• Put your own Twitter handle into the search box, and then when you see your profile pop up in the left-hand sidebar, click on the plus button.

That's it! Easy-peasy. I learned about this add Townsville Social Media - for screenshots and more details, see their helpful post: How to add yourself to a Twitter List you created.

And here's my current list of University of Oklahoma faculty and staff that I've found at Twitter. I was able to add some new people thanks to the Tech Expo's Twitter backchannel on Friday. Whoo-hoo!

Step by Step: Creating a Twitter List

I'm thinking about doing some Twitter tips for my students next semester, so I'm going to put possible tips here for now, writing out the instructions before I decide which ones to actually use at my class website. So, here are my preliminary notes for a Tech Tip on creating a Twitter list!

To create a Twitter list, go to your Twitter account, then click on Lists. You will then see a button to "Create List." When you create a list, you will be prompted to give the list a name, along with an optional description. You can make the list public so that other people can see and subscribe to the list, or you can decide to keep it private.

You can use the Search feature to find people to add, or you can just click on people as you find them but, instead of following them, you can add them to a list. Instead of clicking on the Follow button (blue bird), just click on the button next to it, which will give you a dropdown menu allowing you to add to (or remove from) a list.

The great advantage of lists is that it is a way to keep track of someone's tweets without following them so that their tweets show up in your stream. So, for example, I keep a Doctor Who list. I love Doctor Who, and just for fun I like to follow the Doctor Who Twitterverse... but it's not something I have time for every day, and I cannot resist the temptation of seeing all those tweets in my main stream! (For people who use Google+ as I do, lists are a lot like circles, at least in terms of how you can use them to manage your incoming tweets.)

When you create a list, it has an address, so here is the list for Doctor Who that I created:
https://twitter.com/OnlineCrsLady/lists/doctor-who

Because it is a URL, you can bookmark it, which gives you instant and easy access to the list, and you can favorite and retweet posts from a list stream, just as you can from a regular stream.

You can also make a widget based on a list. Just go to Settings, choose Widgets, Create New Widget, choose the List tab, select the list, choose your other options, and then create the widget! Twitter will then give you the HTML you need to embed the widget as you can see below.

---

Tweets from https://twitter.com/OnlineCrsLady/doctor-who

Twitter: Getting to Know a New Space

This blog actually got started as a result of a defunct Twitter project at my school. Even though the project is defunct (in fact, I guess you could say it backfired), I've carried on using Twitter and have made it a part of my daily routine for a few weeks now. So, it looks like it is going to stick! I still find Twitter kind of strange and frustrating compared to the other social spaces I use and have used (e.g., Google+, Chatter, Yammer, and Ning), but it is turning out to be useful, especially for finding news and announcements about events happening at my school. Here are some things I have done that seem to have made this particular use of Twitter successful for me.

• Lists. The most important part of my Twitter routine is checking the two extensive lists I made related to my school: University of Oklahoma Programs and University of Oklahoma Faculty and Staff. My main Twitter routine consists of checking those lists periodically during the day. I follow some of these Twitter accounts, but primarily I check them via the list. Why aren't such lists compiled and maintained by the WebComm group at my school? Hmmmm... Anyway, I compiled them myself and they have proven to be very useful, although the large majority of accounts seem to be dormant.
• Integration with Blog Posting. Right now, I have several blogs that I update regularly, so I made a schedule for sharing a link at Twitter for new posts at these blogs (Bestiaria Latina blog, Latin LOLCats, GrammarCatz, Foreign Words, and also this Digital Tools blog). I also share from my class announcements blog when appropriate. I don't do this automatically; instead, I just tweet about the posts manually, and that also gives me an excuse to check in at Twitter periodically during the day.
• Following People I Know. It's been fun to follow people at Twitter whom I know either from Google+ and/or from their blogs. Some people really are good at creating a presence on Twitter, using the format very creatively. I enjoy reading their tweets and maybe I will even learn from them how to make good use of this insanely tiny space for expression.
• Don't Worry; Be Happy. Although I'm not really following very many people at Twitter, I don't even try to keep up with the stream. At Google+, I really do keep up with a core group of people, while also keeping an eye on the stream at large. At Twitter, though, I just kind of kick back and let it happen, without expecting to be able to keep up. That means Twitter feels less real to me, less about real relationships - kind of like eavesdropping and chatting with random people on public transportation as opposed to having conversations around the water cooler at work. Different, but still useful/entertaining in its own way!

I am really inspired to use Twitter when I see how it is being used by the folks at my school who run the World Literature Today and Neustadt accounts (both out of the World Literature Today office). They post such great stuff, and I really like the way they share information about WLT events, but also all kinds of other literary news and information. The other OU accounts are focused on promoting campus events, really of interest only to OU folks, but the World Literature Today people are writing for a wider audience, and they are doing a fabulous job of it, too. 

I was expecting to see much more Twitter usage by the "WebComm" group at my school and other programs on campus that have made it a goal to make use of social media for institutional purposes. I'm glad to find what I have found, of course, but it is much less than I would have expected, given how quick and easy Twitter is to use. Maybe they devote their real attention to Facebook... and that's one tool I am not going to use. Twitter is fine by me; Facebook is not.

Meanwhile, I'll update this post in a month or so when we see whether I am really sticking with Twitter as a part of my daily routine. For now, I have included below an infographic which might be useful for people who are thinking about getting started with Twitter. Twitter is certainly a space that is used by many educators, and this infographic has some good tips for educators who want to give Twitter a try.

---

From TeachThought.com:

An Infographic That Summarizes Twitter For Teachers.

Here's the full-sized image.

Hashtags for Projects: #foreignwordsinenglish

Like many people, I am not the best at remembering to hashtag my work online, but I do have a few hashtags that I have stuck with and which have provided very useful. The #LatinLOLcat is one I have been using for my Latin LOLCat project, for example, #GrammarCatz for my GrammarCatz. I use these hashtags when I post at Google+ about new items in these projects, and now that I am back on Twitter, of course I use the hashtags at Twitter too.

Just recently, I started using a new one: #foreignwordsinenglish - along with the related hashtags #sanskritwordsinenglish #arabicwordsinenglish and so on. I'm pretty excited about it - I'm going to be posting one every day at Google+ and then also at Twitter.

Just like with my other projects, the basic foundation for this new project is a blog, and the hashtag corresponds to the label I am using in the blog: Foreign Words in English. I still don't have a lot of discipline in using hashtags when I post at Google+ and Twitter, but using labels religiously at my blogs has been a big help in getting me more used to the idea of using hashtags when I post.

This little experiment is something I started as a result of reviving my Twitter account - hashtags reign supreme at Twitter, far more so than at Google+. Here's an embedded Google+ post with today's word - and you can follow the #foreignwordsinenglish tag at Twitter. Maybe others will start using #foreignwordsinenglish also (how cool that would be!)... but even if not, it works for me, and as I accumulate a big supply of these, the hashtag will let people read past ones in addition to the new one I post each day, and I can link to the Twitter hashtag stream so people can see that the project really is ongoing, with a new word every day!

---

Twitter List: OU People Twitter

I find lists to be incredibly useful at Twitter! The main reason I have started using Twitter again is to be more connected with the social networking scene (such as it is) at my school, and I was delighted to find lots of University of Oklahoma faculty and staff who are indeed using Twitter, some of them very actively. I don't follow all of these people, but whenever I find an OU faculty or staff member at Twitter, I add them to this list, and I make sure to check it periodically every day. It is a source for many of my retweets, and I have made some personal connections this way, too.

Below is a list of the latest tweets from the OU People Twitter List.

If you have a Twitter account to add to the OU People List, let me know! Here I am at Twitter: OnlineCrsLady. I also keep a list of OU Programs.

---

Tweets from @OnlineCrsLady/ou-faculty-staff

Confused About #Hashtags? Let’s Set Things Straight

Nice article at Hashtags.org:

Confused About #Hashtags? Let’s Set Things Straight

Topics covered:

1. What is a hashtag?
2. Who can make hashtags?
3. How should you use hashtags?
4. What mistakes should you avoid?
5. Where should hashtags be placed?

And be sure to check out the related articles at the bottom, too!

Guide to Hashtags – History, Role and How to Use Them

This two-part series is useful in learning about hashtags. The focus is on hashtags for business campaigns and commercial branding, but there is also good information about the use of hashtags for real-time chat, search and discovery, and the building of the semantic web.

Guide to Hashtags – History, Role and How to Use Them Part 1

Guide to Hashtags – History, Role and How to Use Them Part 2

OU Programs Twitter

Below is a list of the latest tweets from the OU Programs Twitter List.

If you have a Twitter account to add to the OU Programs List, let me know! (laura-gibbs@ou.edu)

---

Tweets from @OnlineCrsLady/ou

OU Social Media Directory: Starting an OU Programs Twitter List

Using the OU Social Media Directory, I updated my OU Programs Twitter list and it's a public list, so you can make use of it too:

• members of my OU Programs Twitter list (if you have more suggestions, let me know!)
• tweets from the OU Programs Twitter list

You can subscribe to that list too if you want; you'll see the subscribe button here (left-hand column), and you can also choose to just follow individual members of the list (right-hand column). To get a sense of what you'll see, here's a widget that shows the latest tweets from that list:

Tweets from @OnlineCrsLady/ou