Changing the #twitterheart to X via simple coding

When twitter first changed the star into heart, I could not be bothered. Although I must admit I did follow some of the discussions (one from Kate Bowles here).

Software is always biased and represents the cultural and philosophical background of the developer/s (nice overview paper from Friedman and Nissenbaum, 1996, but also a lot articles, latest one from Gizmodo on job application software). This is also true for the symbols socmed companies use, in this case the #twitterheart. But when tweaking of those symbols becomes really simple it becomes a pleasure to change the symbols used... oh Yes.

Vicky Curtis got me on to this nice and simple Chrome/Firefox extension tweak to change the twitter heart into something you like. (tough part: finding a symbol you want to use... I went for a mobile phone.

The idea comes from Robert McNees who shared a full code via Github here. But this is a bit of work, a simplified version was offered by Adam Clark Estes from Gizmodo in an overview article, focusing on a simple addition of coded lines to a browser extension (either chrome/firefox), which only takes 6 steps to get the twitter heart replaced by an emoji (= character or symbol) of your choice. Neat!

Now, because I combined the article of Adam Clark Estes with the updated coding from Robert McNees = @McNees , I will add the steps I used in this post. Btw, at the end I also choose the "URL's that start with' option to add behind the 'applies to' option inside of the Stylish extension. So here it goes:

Step 1: Download the Stylish extension for Chrome or Firefox. (There are a host of other extensions to restyle the web, but Stylish is super easy to use.)

Step 2: Open Stylish (= click on the 'Manage installed styles' option within the Browser icon of Stylish for a new window to open, then click on 'write new style' - button)

Step 3: paste the wonderful code from Robert McNees into that new style window, find the code here at Github. 

Step 4: change the standard emoji, with the emoji of your preference (you can search for images of emoji and then copy paste them into the code).

Step 5: In the “Applies to:” field below the code, choose the option 'URL's that start with' (otherwise you only get the changes for twitter.com and not your own tweets).

Step 6: Click Save and your twitter should be updated with your own emoji.  

My biggest difficulty was finding the right emoji... still not sure about my simple X... and there seems to be some hearts still not adjusted, but getting there. And in the meantime, chaos in symbols is adding some diversity. 

Sian Bayne keynote on teacherbot #emoocs2015 @sbayne

Great keynote by Siän Bayne who is professor of digital education at the University of Edinburgh, UK, on teacherbot, a twitterbot used within an educational mooc. Really interesting from the automation point and social effect on the debate.

Sian provides multiple references, so where possible I mention the author and year of the reference in this liveblog. Hot from the press Times Higher Ed article on Teacherbot here.

1 Debates in teacher automation

Artificial intelligenc in education

Adaptive learning

Teacher automation

Suppes, 1966; automated teacher visionair

Electric tutors: education is about to undergo a revolution unequalied since Gutenberg’s movable type. Arthur C. Clark – visionary article

The electronic tutor is going to spread across the planet as wiftly as the transistor radio … pure technocentriciy (1980)

By 2011 – Underwood and Luckin: AI in education are still not very well known about, not very well used, because we have not understood why to use them or how to use them.

So there is a body of research which critiques this automated tutor.

Feenberg, 2003: the goal is to replace fac-to-face teaching by professional faculty with an industrial product, infinitly reproducible at decreasing unit cost – critique.

This has attracted a lot of funding opportunities, again it is very political.

Who is thinking against this? Neil Selwyn has written many books describing the neo-liberal, capitalist lines of this automated vision.

How can we respond to this automation function?

Critical pedagogy approach would bring the focus back to the correlation with students and tutors (Clegg, 2003).

Humans, academics and teachers working together.

Mobilization in defense of the human touch (Feenberg, 2003)

2 the people t/technology divide

Two choices provided by Hamilton and Friesen, 2013

Instrumentalism: technologies are seen as neutral means employed for ends determined independitly by their users.

Essentialism: technology has its own trajectory, humans need to adapt, like a Newtonian god, watche unaffected as the drama unfolds.

This is something we must think about critically to move forward.

Things and people need to learn to join – (Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck, 2011) focusing on the world and the dynamics in them.

Whatmore, 2004: the human is always evolving and adapting to tech, we (tech and human) make each other.

Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be (Arthur c clark)

3 twitterbots as a cultural form

Twitterbots tweet on their own without any human action. 8,5 % tweets are deliverd by twitterbots.

So it is an interesting, contemporative social form. Here are some examples.

Example: ‘dear assistant’ made by amit agarwal, or LA quakebot made by bill snitzer, Olivia taters made by rob dubbin, desire bot made by felix jung,

Bots of conviction: they can be all sorts of functions, with this bot being political. NRA Tally made by Mark Sample, two headlines made by darius kazemi.

Rob dubbin wants to demystify what happens in the world through critical twitterbots.

4 teacherbot in the EDCMOOC

This bot wants to do some critical work on the boundaries of teacher and technology.

Teacherbot ran from October/November 2014 in Coursera mooc (12000 enrollments).

50% of enrollers work in education, so should be perceptive to this critical teacherbot.

#edcmooc : based on a simple GUI : mostly topics were process, content, social and pastoral related (see example in picture)

Challenge was to make a teacherbot that was part of the curriculum. So now the answers of the bot were fed content from the course.

Serious lessons: we never intended to trick the learners into thinking it was human. Everyone knew.

Teacherbot got into a dark loop at first, with a fatalistic tweet, but then things settled down.

The bot was actually very dominantly present in the twitter stream (about 25% of the tweets)

But it got extra discussions and reflections going (ambush teaching)

5 Rethinking teacher automation

Deficit => excess: based on teacher numbers. The teacherbot helped with creating excess.

Supercession => entanglement: if we do automation right/wrong it will affect teachers. The question was to find what the interest would be for education as complimentary extra’s.

Embrace/resistance => play

What works => what do we want?

Sian Bayne (2015) teacherbot in journal of higher education to be found here.

Filtering for Future ProFessional Frontiers #pkm14

As the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM14) course moves into its second week, all the participants are asked to filter their social media / their networks. We are suggested to use more advanced filters: e.g. using feeds from people or/and groups, using automated filters of choice (e.g. hootsuite or tweetdeck to filter the personal twitter and other streams).

First I took a look at hootsuite (suggested by Ronda Zelezny-Green) and tweetdeck (both of these are free to some extend. Another paid option is sproutsocial which has wonderful options, but fits more with an enterprise type of social media stream analysis. I tested both and looked at other user comparisons to get an idea of which tool would suit me. I had both used them briefly in the past, but not to their full potential. And as it has been some years now, it is clear that I am better at understanding what these types of tools can do, and the overall structure of the tools in themselves is an improved user experience as well. For me Hootsuite works (but without integrating it into my browser, that feature was the reason why I stopped using hootsuite in the past: too much bling makes me angry and puts me off a tool - but that is me, not the tool).

After only two days, I already found some immediately relevant information (e.g. more status updates on learning analytics for informal learning, more about weak/strong ties in online communities), but at the same time I am loosing more time as I got lost in an information loop. Again... knowledge management is about finding useful tools, optimizing or personalizing them to fit your own goals, and limiting your time on those tools to get the best experience out of them (for me the best experience is: activating a peer network. One immediate benefit of Hootsuite is being able to schedule tweets, this saves time and will - eventually - keep me from returning to my streams in Hootsuite until a moment in time I consciously choose and limit.

The information streams in Hootsuite are currently based on one list, and keywords (e.g. mLearning, learning analytics). I started to build MyKeyPeople list within twitter: adding those twitterers that are of importance to me, that provide new insights, links, ideas.

But I do realize this is person-based, now - like a fellow participant Kavi (@_Kavi ) mentioned - knowledge can be distilled from a higher level by using twitter lists and combining these, or to search for good curators/curations and link these to a RSS/feedread or scoopit... I still have to work on those options. So that makes a good to do. 
Speaking of to do lists, another participant of the course (Shane Johnson) mentioned todoist, a cross-platform software to plan your time or project. Will have to see if this works for me. 

Early #career researchers and how to get a job?

With every career move, there comes a time of trepidation, confusion, wild gesturing in the living room while expressing "where am I going? What am I doing?!". That is the phase I am in right now. Luckily Andy Coverdale tweeted about a twitter chat for ... early career researchers! And although my grey hairs tend to remind me of careers passed... I feel I am an early career protagonist once again due to my choice to dig into PhD and its research challenges.

To be honest I have NO idea of where to go to once my PhD would be finished, I do not even have an idea on how to go about building towards getting an interesting position... if anyone is interested, here is my short bio: into innovation, teaching big classes, taking initiatives, getting projects funded and realized, international speaker, allround charming presence, passionate about research/writing/new media and mobile MOOCs.... anyone... anyone who wants to hire me? A call for jobs in a blog, is this a good idea? Well why not, so leaving it in.

A friend with an amazing mind Michael Sean Gallagher just got a professor position at the prestigious, international Hankuk University and as I am so eager to learn how that happens I could not wait to ask him how he did it: networking and putting his work out there was his answer.

But even with a network, publications, projects under my belt... the thing I am missing is how to go about it? How can I get hold of positions opening up and me getting there? And do you really need to go through all the hoops (postdoc, fellowship... I do not even know all the names). Or maybe I should create hoops? There must be some backchannel to get in a position based on expertise, drive, capacity to go where no research human has gone before? Or maybe that is more a corporate option? ... Well, that would be the position I would go for anyway. 

New colleague shows #Twitter for #academics and #researchers report

Getting in contact with new colleagues is always inspirational. Ildikó Bokros is one of such knowledge rich colleagues. She has pointed me towards a 11-page Twitter overview sheet which lists the twitter advantages for academics. The twitter report is fresh in lay-out, to the point and written by Amy Mollett, Danielle Moran and Patrick Dunleavy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The report is very useful if you want to get people in your institute oriented on the potential of Twitter, but also to get them started: setting up a twitter account, useful twitter terminology, tweeting styles, how to build a relevant network of followers, ... nice, short and to-the-point.

You can find the twitter for academics report here.

Let others find your most read blogposts via PostRank

[Look at the right side bar to see the blogpost ranking in action]

The last few months many people have been writing about the surplus of networks and finding the content you are looking for as quickly and simple as possible in a knowledge world.

Although I agree that linking, filtering and constructing are just a couple of qualities that a contemporary learner (and I see all of the contemporary professionals as learners) should have to keep updated on the latest content and knowledge in a particular field, it is not easy to disseminate your own knowledge. Many knowledge workers mention many options: feeds, streams, blogs, collaborative networks... but at the end of the day you yourself need to stay on top of what people are interested in. But if networks are getting increasingly important, it will be essential to provide your network(s) with immediate extra's.

So what part of your brain do others want to pick? What niche might you have? In order to do this you can use a number of analytic tools, but those tools are just providing data for your own interest. What about data that is of immediate use to your own network? Today I came across an easy to use widget that gives just that bit of extra: PostRank. This widget extrapolates your most read blogposts, enabling new readers to take a look at those particular posts others found interesting, thus increasing the chance of your posts being followed. And in addition, if they are interested in case those readers have a specific topic of interest, they can search on that specific topic in the lower end of the widget (look at the widget on the side).

In addition to this widget they have a twitter widget for educational blogs as well: http://twitter.com/pr_education (get picked up in this twitter by adding #postrank & #education) through which I found the link to a post of Stephen's Web on 'Should Learning be Free and Open?' written by Curt Bonk.

By the way Stephen Downes Ol'Daily is one of my favorite ways to stay on top of what experienced learners have to say about learning... and I do not think the ol'daily has a official hyped term to define what it does, it is just the thing to get connected to if you are interested in learning content (I still have a lot to learn and still have a lot of things to change in order to improve dissemination of interesting learning topics).

Thanks to the global educational blogger Christian Kreutz for getting me posted on postrank.

Hashtags in Twitter and walls, fountains, ways to keep everyone's remarks in the picture

It is Friday, my head is already moving into weekend-drive and so I was looking for something small and nice to share. Twitter is used by a lot of people at this point. Some of its use is focusing on real-time feedback from participants, learners, students... So I bundled a few of the nice twitter applications that let you stay on top of everything that is happening in and during your event (when hastagged). If you are emerged in Twitter, you will have been using all of these and more, but otherwise, these apps can bring an 'aaaaahhhaaaa'-feeling to any event you are hosting or participating in.

First of all, no matter what type of course, event... you are moderating or presenting Twitter can add to your overall communication. But as such all of the students, participants and stakeholders need to be in synch with the event. So you need to set up a hashtag that people can use in order for other twitters to find relevant information that is posted for the event. If you want to get a feel of what is going on, put in a hashtag at this #hashtags search site to see what comes up (e.g. #eLearning or let's say you are presenting at Brussels Internet Convention in 2070; then a possible hashtag would be: #BIC2070 or #BIC70) and who is using those hashtags.

Some of these applications to ask your twitter account, so if you did not set it up yet, you might want to.

Let's say you are going to present something at a conference, meeting... or just during a course that you want to liven-up with some extra interactivity; you will want to make a hashtag for your event AND you will want to keep track of everything that is being posted on this (your) subject. Keeping on top of all the hashtags will be easier if you use any of these tools because they centralize everything in one and the same page or area:

Tweetchat
If you want to stay on top and interact with the people that send you comments through hashtags, you might want to use tweetchat as it enables you to interact just like twitter (comments, favorite). I like this one for if I have more time to interact behind the computer or mobile. All you need to do is open tweetchat and put in the hashtag and off you go.

twitterfountain
Another option is Twitterfountain (Dutch based): this is a nice app if you want to add a widget to a central page and still be able to stay in touch with the relevant hashtagged remarks that are published. You just adjust the widget to what you want to see, copy it and paste it into any page or area you want. It can also add Flickr photos, so if you are having a multimedia presentation, you can ask people to send their pictures immediately to a dedicated flickr-account and .... those pictures will show as the background of the tweets (a bit busy though).

Twitterwall
Another nice application you can use for this purpose and which is less stressful for the eyes (in case you have a lively presentation) is twitterwall, it is easy and straight forward: you just go to twitterwall, put in your tag, if prefered you add a URL that will be shown as a background and ... you get the latest tweets on the topic. For example this link based on the 'eLearning africa' tag.

Instructional Design: What do you get when you mix articulate presenter, with captivate, with camtasia, with webquiz ... you could get THIS

How can you mix all kinds of software's AND social media apps? That is one of the questions I have roaming about in the back of my mind. On the verge of my vacation, I wanted to test a new software (Articulate Presenter) and see if other software that we use to build courses with can be implemented.

If you want to, you can see the result following this link (it is an nice mashup for different educational goals). It works with Flash, so sometimes he preloads to buffer the multimedia files.

The final product was produced by Articulate Presenter, but I mixed in Del.icio.us, Camtasia, phpBB, Captivate, QuickCam pro movies, a Ning community, Articulate Quizmaker quizzes, hotspot quiz and even a Canadian Bear!

If you are interested in the production specifics, you can click on the tab 'notes' inside the articulate presenter course.

The font size of the Articulate Presenter is rather small but at this point you cannot change the font-size, but this is a feature Articulate Presenter's developing team is tackling and hopefully they will program a solution soon.

I really enjoyed the first half of the year and so now.... I am off on my vacation (more specifics in the presentation).

CommonCraft on Twitter

For anyone teaching about Twitter: look at (yet another) cool video from the CommonCraft team (Leelefever in particular):

comparing Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce

Comparing Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce, gave me a better idea of the things I could use them for. Just read the table to get a quick idea of the differences or look at the video.

Why use it for eLearning purposes:
To inform your learners of the latest developments in eLearning software;
To announce a course that is starting;
To remind them there is a deadline approaching;
To give them more of a team spirit, we all know it is difficult to get a community spirit going and these microblogging systems help with that;
To give learners in low resource settings the possibility to add ideas to a discussion;
To ask a question and get a lot of answers;
To inform learners of a spontaneous get together;
…

Why I want to use it?
Because it enables students from low resource settings to become part of an online group through their mobile phones. And because it is fun!

Twitter	Jaiku	Pownce
Rss available	Rss available	Rss is bugged
Mobile support works great	Mobile support only for Nokia smart phones for the moment, but the java version for the rest is in development	No mobile support
One message template	One message template	Some templates for sending specific things: events, links
Limited amount of characters to be written	Limited amount of characters in the post, unlimited in the comments	Limitless approach to the message that can be send.
No grouping	Grouping is possible with channels, you can easily become a member of existing channels.	You can group persons in sets
No attachment option	No attachment options	Attachment options
You can see a thread of the direct messages	The threading is very interesting: although the posting is limited to 140 characters. Comments are possible and the comments can be as long as you wish.	Threads visible by clicking the title or choosing what you want to see. posting and commenting characters are unlimited.
Public timeline	You can explore public jaikus.	No public timeline, which leaves you disconnected to potential interests.
api documentation available	Api available	Api is not there yet, but it is promised for September 2007
web based	web based	Web based and desktop feature, BUT this requires installing Adobe Air.
Support, but not immediately linked to a community, it’s more of a FAQ-page	Very nice support community	No immediate link to a support community
Limited notifications	Notifications limited to mobile or sms	More notification options
you can not easily customize your profile	Only limited adjustments in your profile are possible	You can customize your profile
You can personalize the background + color scheme	Your own background image	You must select one of the fixed themes
The nice specials
Great Firefox extensions	Very nice location feature	You can forward a note
Add feeds to your Twitter e.g. with Twitterfeed	You can integrate other feeds (e.g. your twitter feeds J

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