SocialToo

I was introduced to SocialToo by a direct message from a new person I followed today.

We have a couple of projects running at the moment using Twitter for support or for creating networks (smallworlds and PLEs) and having struggled with ways to keep track of new people signing up to the service at the beginning of each project and automated way to do this would be great.

SocialToo allows you automatically send a DM with a message (written by you) to anyone who follows you and can be set to automatically follow them back. This was the first time I had had a DM from someone I had followed and it made me feel all warm and happy and wanted, especially as David followed it up with a DM of his own asking me something simple about my work based on my twitter profile statement. Very smart, great way to build a network.

I could see this working with our students, if they have just signed up to twitter and accepted the default settings, a DM would generate an email to them, pulling them back to twitter and it would be a personal contact.

You can only associate one twitter account with each socialtoo account, so haivng created multiple twitter identities for our different audiences, we would need matching social too accounts. Having said that, it is a one shot deal, set up the account and leave it to work automatically.

You can also set the account to automatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you, though I am not sure we would want this with students on our undergraduate course. SocialToo also has a survey tool which can be used to post surveys to twitter, could be useful for getting quick and dirty feedback on topics, issues etc.

TouchGraph is very pretty

TouchGraph is very pretty. I came across it whilst wandering around online (I find I regularly suffer from obsessive link-clicking until I forget what I came online for). I wondered into the Science 2.0 friend feed room, got distracted by the edubloggers room and saw a link for a list of PLE maps and diagrams (posted by Mike Bogle), and was amused to find Alan’s diagram on there. I saw beautiful one created by D’Arcy Norman and just had to see how it had been made (see how one things leads to another?).

Anyway, a quick play determined that it probably wasn’t the tool I had hoped it would be. Initially I had thought it could be used for students to quickly create a map/ visual representation of their personal learning environment, but it is powered by google search, so not as specific as it would need to be. I tried several different searches (jobadge/ Jo Badge with and without quotes) but none of them really represented what i was using. I tried ‘ajcann’ instead, and got a fairer map – the one shown above, it includes Alan’s slideshare account, twitter, microbiologybytes and technorati ID’s butmost the links coming off these centres are not related – for example, from twitter, the links are not to the people who follow Alan or are his friends.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: PLE

The evolution of my PLE

Alan set me some homework while I am frittering my time away at home this summer. He wanted to know if my PLE at work and at home were different. I have actually concluded that they are not different from each other at all. I am not sure what to think about that. Perhaps it tells me that I need to get some interest outside of work!

However, it did start me thinking about my first ventures into thinking about the tools I used online as a PLE. I started a wikispaces wiki, jople (natty name eh?!) mainly to play with wikispaces, but mostly in response to Alan’s tutorial on PLEs. I came up with something that looked like this:

Jo's PLE in January 2008

I thought I would redraw it. Only 7 months later, I was quite amazed by how it had changed…

Jo's PLE July 2008

When drawing this second PLE, the main thing that struck me (and that I had trouble conveying in the diagram, I am a bulleted list kinda girl), is that there are many more connections between the tools I am using now. Flock has been instrumental in this, helping me to bring lots of different strands together. Start ingof this blog, and others, has also changed the way I use delicious to create RSS feeds on particular topics. Pulling an RSS feed into google reader from my delicious network has been extremely interesting and provided a real wealth of information that I haven’t accessed before.

Of course, the biggest change has been using twitter. Without it, I doubt I would have discovered or used half of the new tools I now use regularly.

p.s using Zemanta Firefox extension for WP on this post. It is tremendously cool. I found it reviewed on Doug’s blog that I started reading because I followed Doug on twitter.