An old friend of mine, Carol Daunt (Brisbane, Australia) has single handedly turned me on to Plurk. Plurk, despite its silly name, is a microblogging tool that is at once both jolly good fun and strangely addictive. It got me thinking - as I clumsily divided my time between Twitter and Plurk - about the potential learning and teaching affordances of the two tools. How do they differ and how can we leverage (if we should even attempt to) these tools into pedagogy. I also implied the question about splitting time between the two, because as everyone knows, men aren't allowed to be multi-taskers! - it simply isn't credible to at least half of the population. As these social networking microblogging tools grow in popularity and users build up huge followings which make them even harder to cut loose from - how can we harness their power for better communication, collaboration and smarter learning?So I posted this question on my Twitter stream - "Anyone using either Twitter or Plurk with students for real learning/teaching? Or are they inappropriate tools for those kind of purposes?"
Drew Buddie (The Digital Maverick from Rickmansworth, England) was first to respond within a few seconds. He reported that he had used Twitter to show his students the power of social networking in an instantaneous way - with live answer coming back from his Twitter followers. As I have done the same thing with my students recently, and also during a workshop in Austria last month, I agree that this is a powerful demonstration. Kim Gaskins (Cambridge, Massahusetts: USA) felt that the choice was clear - some of the online discussion groups she had experienced were 'a mess' and Twitter did seem a lot cleaner. This was due to the ability for users to folow specific people, choose what to respond to, guided by clearly defined icons so that they could identify who is who on a preserved feed. Ann Steckel (California State University Chico, USA) said that some of the nursing faculty there use Twitter with their students to enablen them to connect when they are working asynchronously, and that the tool is incorporated into BlackBoard.
It was brought to my attention by Michelle A Hoyle (London, England) that A J Cann (Leicester, England) is using a combination of Twitter and Friendfeed with his students with some success. Michelle herself believes that Plurk is a better collaborative tool because it is threaded and these threads can be bookmarked/archived. I admit it does seem to be more difficult to follow particular threads on Twitter, particularly when you are following 151,475 Twitterers like some people do. She advises using Tweetdeck which allows you to define groups of people and easily follow threads of Tweets. Without this kind of bolt-on tool, the signal to noise ration can be impossible to cut through. Jose Picardo (Nottingham, Ehgland) has used Edmodo.com to rationalise use of Jaiku, Twitter and Plurk.
James McConville (Vancouver, Canada) tried out Plurk after reading my tweets and declared that it seemed addictive. This is an issue I think can be attributed to the immediacy (the synchronous chat boxes) and also the 'Karma' feature which makes Plurk almost game like.
So this was an interesting conversation with about a dozen people from all over the globe, in just a few minutes. It has yielded some interesting ideas, some of which I intend to follow up on when I get a break from all the marking I am doing at the moment. If anyone else out there has any comments, views or tips on using either of these two tools, or anything related to them, please comment below. See you on Plurk. Or Twitter. Or if you are able to multi-task .... both. (I may faint).
No comments:
Post a Comment