Things 4: Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Storify

I will admit that I have a twitter account, but because I can’t easily access it from work I do find it hard to follow. Although saying that it is very useful and you can find out a lot of information from it. I do struggle to keep within the word limit. The very nature of twitter is that it is a conversation and I do struggle with the speed of the responses.  So joining in can be difficult as I think that I am just catching up on the conversation. I suppose, as long as I have something to say, people will not mind.

I recently took part in a chartership chat and I was blown away by the speed and found it difficult how to follow conversations. The next time I took part I asked how to other people followed it and used Tweetdeck this made it much easier to follow and responded to the different questions that were being asked.

I have be brave and but a link in to a blog post which I had written and was impressed with the number of people who did read my post. So twitter is a really good way of getting your thoughts across to other professionals. I am also really impressed by how concise you have to be and it is a very skill, to be able to get your message across in 140 characters.

RSS feeds

I have used these in the past, during the day job and they are useful. I struggle to try and find a reader which works for me. I have tried google reader but get a bit lost I suppose I should and work at it as it would be easier to follow the latest goings on.

Storify

I will admit that this was completely new to me, and on first glance I don’t know if it will be that useful. I looked at some of the links which you gave and the reflection one on the chartership chat was really useful. This would be a good way to find out what other people are thinking and then reflect on what they have thought. It would be interesting to use this tool to keep the twitter feed but I am not sure if this will be useful to me. I suppose it would be useful to keep photos of a process which you could refer back to if your students were more visual. But I am not convinced that this will be a useful tool for me, although I will have read other peoples posts to see what they think.

Scoop.it

I really do like the look of this tool especially after reading Ian Clarke's blog. This is something which I am going to investigate, with a focus on e-learning, an issue which I am really interested in. I look forward to posting my results:)