Is Dawkins really tweeting?

I was amazed today to see a piece in Cell about whether scientists should twitter. In it David Bradley compares his twitter following to that of two celebrity tweeters, ‘Richard Dawkins has almost 25,000 followers on his Twitter feed; the actor Ashton Kutcher has 3.8 million‘.

I wrote very excitedly about the appearance of @richard_dawkins back in 2008. I thought that his appearance on twitter would legitimise the medium for scientists and encourage others to experiment with it.  Unfortunately, I got a stock publicity comment on the blog from ‘dawkins’ and it was shown to be an imposter. So I checked back from the Cell article today and I was rather surprised to see that the account was still alive and had such a big following (25,879). I assume that this is the account to which David refers, since it has just over 25,000 followers. Interestingly @richarddawkins has almost as many followers (17,680). The latter links to richarddawkins.net the former to Richarddawkins.com. Neither twitter account has a ring of authenticity to it, no conversation, just broadcast. Both could easily be simple ways to make a lot of money on amazon click through ads, but my money is on @richarddawkins as the legitimate source (richard_dawkins follows some suspect peeps and as much as we would all like to see Dawkins following The Official Jesus, and God, I can’t quite see it happening).

So, two accounts, neither embracing twitter in any way other broadcasting.  What a shame and a wasted opportunity to engage.

Leicester staff Tweet-up

twitter cake from flickr

Following a hastily arranged local meet up, twitterers came for a coffee, tea and some cake at David Wilson Library Cafe, Leicester University. We marvelled at Mark’s shoes and only talked in 140 character sentences.

I went through my list of followers to find staff and postgrads from Leicester University and DeMonfort University that are tweeting and was surprised how many people there were. Andrew (@steepholm) asked for a list and I started typing and it got silly, there are LOADS of us

To save RSI, can you please add yourself to the list using this google form?

Results will be automatically added here as a list of Twitterers

We’ll organise another face to face session (with cake) again soon.

HEAT3 iPod Touch project

We were fortunate to be given some funding from TechDis from HEAT3 scheme to buy 10 iPod Touches for use with students. A summary of our findings were presented at the HEA Annual Conference in Manchester on 2 July through a poster and short slide show, copies below.

Student Microblogging And Recording Timelines (SMART)

View more OpenOffice presentations from Jo Badge.

View this document on Scribd

Effective customer service via twitter?

credit:Paul Rj Muller "CaffiNation" flickr

As twitter becomes mainstream in terms of recognition by the great masses, it has inevitably become a target for marketeers and spammers alike. When I first started using twitter, one of the most impressive things about it was the real time responses you could receive to support your use of web 2 technologies. Tweet ‘why is adobe buzzword making all my fonts look wierd’ and within minutes you would get an @reply from adobe offering help. This intelligent use of searches on keywords by companies for support is a great use of twitter. It felt personal.

More recently this seems to have been superseded by a network response, for example I just tweeted about posting something to the wrong blog in wordpress and I got two @replies from people in my network followed by a retweet from the wordpress hash account (#wp). I wondered if companies have found this model unsustainable since the twitter user base has grown so rapidly in the last couple of months.

At the beginning of this academic year, we tried supporting undergraduate students on twitter. There was a handful of students who used twitter and joined in our conversation. It was manageable and I would like think we provided personal, meaningful responses. I wonder what will happen when the new academic year comes around? Will we be able to replicate this support system if every student is twittering? Would we want to? Just as I hate being followed by random people just because I used a particular keyword, will students resent being followed by university staff?

Creating social QR

vCard QR code on iTouch and iMac

Following our QR workshop today, I wanted to create some QR codes to use during the project. Encoding difficult to remember URLs or Vcard information to display as a QR on my iTouch screen for others to capture seemed like a perfect use for this technology.

So I used snappr to create two social links: ‘follow jobadge on twitter’, and a link to this WP blog and I also made my vCard to add to my iTouch.

follow twitter/jobadge

follow DrBadgr blog

vCard for Jo Badge

The vCard I made using QRstuff which only offered a print to paper option, but created a PDF in the process, so this image is a screen capture, but it still works on screen via the iPhone. I was amazed at that! So no need for paper business cards, or giving people my twitter or blog details now. It can all come with me on the iTouch. Reminds me of the old infra red system palm used to beam information from one device to another. I wonder if this will catch on better than that?

Review of my 2008

Sounds like one of the myriad of TV shows that grace our screens in the that weird period between Christmas and new year when they aren’t sure what to put on, but yes, it is time to look back and see what on earth I have done in the last year.

Technology

Overall this has been a year of trying new technology on and offline. Web 2.0 has transformed the way I work. I have lost count of the number of services online I have signed up for (I have 35 listed in my clipperz account, but that is only a fraction of them!). Some have come and gone, others are now part of my daily life:

Twitter: I now have a community of twitterers to help me. My first tweet was in December last year, but it was March before I started using it seriously and June when it became obvious that twitter had become a major channel of communication for me. The experience of a lively twitter back channel at a social Learn event for the OU was amazing. Tweetstats shows your usage over time (my stats are here) – you can see the impact of school holidays.

Blogging: I’ve started two blogs this year, this one and one for the School of Biological Sciences.

PLE: as part of our research project on personal learning environments, my own PLE has undergone quite a shift over time since January 08 and now looks something like this.

PLE version 3

Delicious: (jobadge) I’ve been using delicious much more over the last year.

Publications 2008

Badge, J. L., Dawson, E., Cann, A. J., & Scott, J. (2008). Assessing the accessibility of online learning. Innovations in Education and Training International, 45(2), 103-113.

Bevan R, Badge J, Cann A, Willmott C and Scott J (2008) Seeing eye-to-eye? Staff and student views on feedback Bioscience Education E-journal 12-1

Willmott C and Badge J (2008) Ethics and Plagiarism: helping students write right The Biochemist 30:12-15

Conferences

Suffered from overkill in conference season this summer. Still, made a good impact and put Leicester on the teaching and learning agenda nationally

list of conferences attended and presentations made

Badge, J. L., & Scott, J. (2008). Plagiarism policies: Looking for intra-institutional consistency. Higher Education Academy Annual Conference, Harrogate.

Badge, J. L., Yakovchuk, N., & Scott, J. (2008). Consistent policy into consistent practice: A case study from leicester University . Keynote Paper presented at the Second Meeting on Institutional Polices and Procedures for Dealing with Plagiarism, Oxford Brookes, May 2008

Badge, J. L., Yakovchuk, N., & Scott, J. (2008). Academic culture in transition: Are honour codes a viable solution? Paper presented at the Third International Plagiarism Conference, Gateshead.

Badge, J. L. (2008). Electronic detection of plagiarism. Paper presented at the Preventing and Designing Out Plagiarism HEA Centre for Bioscience, 8 April 2008, University of Leicester.

Grants

lots of success this year with Alan Cann

HEA Centre for bioscience departmental grant: £15k to revolutionise the way we teach first year undergraduates about IT and numeracy using web 2.

TechDis HEAT 3: 10 iPod touches

Roberts fund: small world networks for postgraduate students.

Academic Integrity: continuation funding for research assistant to March 2009

Support

All about the voting this year! Lots of problems with using the electronic voting system on cfs. now time to get it publically written up and move on to embed it’s use in the first curriculum. Interim report from first year of implementation.

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.

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.

Twitter

Kevin asked me how to use twitter, so here is a quick video to get started

There is also Alan’s explanation of why bother in the first place.

Depressed

Dawkins isn’t on twitter then. How depressing. His team have gone into overdrive (I seriously doubt he scanning tweets and blogs himself) and posted a comment to my previous post about how popular his account had been. I guess this is what happens when you move into the world or arguing reason against religion, you leave yourself wide open to the cranks.