Tweeting around on twitter, not quite sure what to do with it.  Looks like you just connect up with existing friends. Asked about finding like-minded people, but have no answers so far as I’ve only got 6 followers. Need to start following you lot but I bet you’ll all just be doing SMiELT homework.

Watched the timeline for a while, mostly pretty mundane conversations, should I start to follow someone randomly?  Saw a mildly erotic tweet “Inspecting the hair on the back of a hand, wondering what that hand would feel like on my skin.” and started following that twitterer, problem is, there seems nowhere to flag content or users as inappropriate for students.  Would we need a filter to use this with a class? If so, would it only filter rude words?  Or would we just avoid the public timeline?  The other thing about the public timeline is that all languages congregate there.

Twitter is perfect for the present continuous though!

I let Alicia Rey introduce me to Pownce where you can use more than the tweety 140 characters.  It also lets you embed photos and videos (but that could be even more problematic if there is no filter) . I don’t feel up to participating in Pownce properly yet, I’m spreading myself too thinly.

Lucy

Yes, as Nancy and Bee said, the introductions do get a bit stale.  Skimming through the mini bios, composing my own and wondering how it comes across (well, I’m much less eminent than most of the group so I would feel rather small in comparison).

Charles Cameron’s Hipbone game seemed like a brilliant idea but was hard to put into practice in the forum as there was so much going on.  It didn’t really work for me, I’ve lost touch with the people on my connection grid.

I think a concrete group task with a small group (four or five people) might have been better for our needs.  Maybe the first week we could be grouped randomly with each group given a name (e.g. signs of the zodiac) . In week 2 we could be obliged to join a group (e.g. colours: red, orange, etc.) that has nobody else from our zodiac group.  It’d work like this:

• OK so I land in the aries group in the first week (birthday at the end of March).  What could the task be?  Well how about jumping in with one of the new tools, say twitter, and ask us to write a collaborative story (e.g. the imaginary diary of someone, maybe a famous person? ), line by line, in twitter.
• In week 2 I look for a colour group that has no aries members.  I join the turquiose group.  We show each other the fake diaries we wrote with twitter and discuss.  Our own task for this week could be to join Flickr, decide on a theme for our turquoise pictures (e.g. we decide to choose age as our theme and I put up a photo of an old man playing with a puppy) and post them, linking to the turquoise group members as contacts.

and so on.

Just a thought, using a tried and tested EFL technique.  I think having a concrete and relatively simple task to do with a group makes us feel secure and gives us a framework to get to know each other in.   The task of looking at ALL the other blogs is rather overwhelming (luckily the opml file doesn’t seem to have one for all participants).

What are the pedagogical implications of social media for ELT?

I think that social media is brilliant for languages, it has some useful elements for other educational uses, but language learning is about communication and that certainly happens a lot with social media.

Are you promoting open participatory skills in ELT? How?

Well, I’m doing my best. I have set up a moodle platform for a part-time CELTA course, they’re using that enthusiastically, networking and collaborating well online as well as offline. The Sessums article is interesting and the New Media Literacies site looks worth keeping tabs on.  I’ll have to use that list as something to aim for in my teaching.

Can these social media help you? How?

Yes, they’re fun, hip, and in the meantime there is a tool for every need (or if not there will be one next week). At my institution there is no staffroom or regular time to meet other teachers, the teachers tend to get very isolated so this could help them to connect and share ideas. It might also be appropriate for some of the normal courses once the teachers find out how easy it is to use.

What are the benefits/constraints that these open environments may bring in your context?

I teach mostly adults and teachers in a continuing education setting so I’m not constrained by fear of accidentally seeing a swear word or inadvertently stumbling into a porn site (although of course we do try to avoid this!).  As our bread and butter is evening courses held once a week, any way we can encourage the group to get to know each other better brings advantages and encourage people to keep attending until the end of the semester and then to sign up for follow-on courses.  Blogging has already started to be used to this end as well as a way of reviewing lessons and to keep those who missed class up to date.

As our evening classes are attended partly for social reasons, I think the use of social networking software between lessons will be welcomed by participants.  We’ve just introduced Moodle which I love but I find it rather big and heavy for most of our needs.

One of the main challenges with introducing anything new is getting the teachers on board.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the different social media things I’m trying out (and I already knew quite a few of them).  Haven’t found time to read those scholarly journal articles yet (I must admit I got distracted on the Internet this evening after following links suggested in the “What is social media” booklet).  Now it’s getting late here and I’ve got to get up with the kids and the larks tomorrow morning so I’m off to bed.  I hope to catch up with my week 2 tasks tomorrow and not get too far behind.

I followed a trail of links from somewhere (can’t remember where I started) and ended up at Vicki Davis’s Cool Cat Teacher blog.  She has a lot of interesting stuff to say about using social networking tools in education.  She’s instigated projects such as Flat Classroom, and she uses Ning networks among other things.  (I’d like to find out more about using these, I’d never heard of Ning until this SMIELT course started.)

It’s hard to keep up with everything I’m hearing about at the moment, there is so much that is new and interesting.

Anne asked (in a comment) which tools she should use for her group of German teenage girls.  Could Ning be the right thing and if so, how would she find a partner class?

Check out this short informative video:

http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/

If you want to know more, there’s a recent article in the Guardian about Facebook, it’s rather long and starts with a lot of stuff about why the author doesn’t like it, but towards the end he goes into the shady side of it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

Big Brother is watching you! Creepy stuff!

What have you noticed about the various platforms that you have opened accounts on? What do they have in common? How do they differ?
That question is too big for this time of night!

Are these environments different from LMS (like Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle and others)? How?
Yes these tools are very different to most LMSs. Moodle does go in this direction but I hear that the others are less open to communication and collaboration.

What does “social media” mean for you? Which social media have you used already and what are your feelings about it?
I use delicious a lot, but mostly for myself, I enjoy flickr but rarely post my own stuff., I rarely blog. Some of this stuff will certainly be useful to me, the mashup with Google Earth for instance. Some things are hard to predict. I can’t imagine becoming a twitterter but I bet kids like it. A lot of these things draw you in while you’re there (e.g. the 43 trio) but I have no inner need to return, I feel rather that I’ve wasted my time a bit.

I enjoy helping to create something useful and meaningful, like Wikipedia pages. On the other hand, now that Wikipedia has started taking itself too seriously, the fun is draining out of it. This might be a danger for other applications., too

Signed up with Twitter. Already had a follower (and I was already following him), don’t know how that happened as I didn’t let them trawl thru my email addresses but at least I know the guy I’m following.

Signed up with community maps and made a map with a few of the local indoor pools:

http://www.communitywalk.com/munich/germany/swimming_pools_of_munich/map/205386

Signed up with voicethread, let it access my flickr page, hope I won’t regret that.

http://voicethread.com/#u37669

Signed up with dotSUB too, currently have not content.

Added links to most of these in my blogroll.

Added blurb about myself.

Lucy

Just had a nice weekend in the nearby mountains. Went to Tegernsee, a lake about 40 minutes away with kids and husband.
We took a cable car up one of the little mountains near the lake. The weather has been unseasonably mild this year (like last year) so there’s very little snow, but at the top there was lots and we made a snowman and played around.
Then we went for a swim. Swimming in Germany is rather wonderful. Each small town seems to have at least one fantastic public pool. This one has several indoor pools, a warm outdoor one and a wide variety of saunas (different temperatures, light, aroma, humidity etc.).

Today we visited an alpine petting zoo and watched a demonstration of birds of prey. Crows and buzzards flew right over our heads (we had to duck) and we got the chance to stroke an owl.

Later we walked up a mountain track to an “alm” (an alpine hut often with a cafe). It had a brilliant view and we sat in the sun with our backs against the warm wood of the hut while the kids fed some goats.

The Alps are so full of people and villages compared to anything in the States or the Antipodes but that has it’s advantages!