Oops, edited after the fact as I forgot I scheduled this post and intended to add content to it at some point. With the excitement of pretending to be Alan Cann all day, I forgot!

I briefly demonstrated our e-learning at Leicester group on citeulike and Alan was going to talk about how we are going to use citeulike for online journal clubs next semester with our second year students on a research skills course.

The slides are on google docs and embedded here from slideshare.

We are hosting a HEA Centre for Biosicence event at Leicester in December.

Enhancing learning through Web2.0

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Medical Sciences Building, University of Leicester

Web2.0 technologies continue to grow, both in diversity and usage and have the potential to impact all areas of learning. How can a bioscientist navigate the technologies of Web2.0 and why should you bother? The Centre for Bioscience would like to bring together examples of Web 2.0 which enhance student learning or academic scholarship. The day will advocate useful approaches rather than advocating particular programmes and be aimed at the novice to moderate user of Web2.0 tools.

Follow this event on Twitter at #CfBweb2 to follow Centre tweets on Twitter or consider joining Twitter.

The Centre hosts a social network site, UK Centre for Bioscience Pilot Social network, to explore the potential of using Web 2.0 with academics in bioscience education in UK HE. Give it a go!

Full programme and registration

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.