Thursday, October 28, 2010

Twitter Tales

This week, I was exploring the use of social networking tools to stimulate or support creative writing with a class. I based one exercise on the Fortunately/Unfortunately wiki.


Twitter
Originally uploaded by respres
I started the story with this tweet: "Unfortunately, while walking to school I fell down a hole!" and the idea was that the students would take turns at continuing the story alternating between "Fortunately" and "Unfortunately". I'll give you the link to the story so far in a moment but a couple of explanations are required to help you make sense of some of the extra messages in the archive.

First, I just posted my tweet with out explanation. As a result, two people expressed concern that I had fallen down a hole! One of the messages in the archive is therefore me thanking them for their concern and explaining what I was doing. The other problem is, not all of the messages showed up in the archive. As a result, I had to re-tweet them. Unfortunately, we ended up with three "Fortunately"s in a row before I re-tweeted. Despite these teething problems, I think the story is beginning to shape up:

Hashtag archive - #BEd42010 A Fortunately, unfortunately story created by BEd students

What do you think of the story so far?

7 comments:

  1. This is a nice idea, I remember you joined in something similar a few years ago:
    http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/sandaig_mcclure/pages/solutions.php
    The Fortunately/Unfortunately wiki is a great find especially with glow wkis here on the horizon here in Scotland.

    looks like twapperkeeper allows you to skip retweets, so it might be an idea to run 2 searches, one with and one without retweets.

    The multiple reply thing is going to happen it could be taken advantage of to make a branching story, but I've not idea of how you would go about automatically displaying that?
    This might be simply doable in the future:
    http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_faq#replies
    I can imagine a page that displays a tweet and then branches to replies, replies to the replies and so on.

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  2. Hello John

    I wondered about combining Twitter with Posterous and building the story there - that would allow for branching stories but could b=get more complex. I liked the simplicity of just using Twitter. In retrospect, it might have been wise to give the students a number, or a person to follow, so that they knew when it was their turn to contribute.

    Another possibility would be to go for something like The Story So Far and set up a formal voting process to choose where the story will go next.

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  3. I like the simplicity of twitter too. I think when the api is added to it would be reasonably simple to do the branching stuff although the display would be a challenge. The Story so far looks good too but would require a bit of prep and administration.

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  4. And here was I thinking you'd merely lost a few marbles! Ah well...

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  5. Thanks again John


    Hello Chris

    Of course, it's possible that I have lost a few marbles as well.

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  6. Hi John - This is a great idea - I also found some other great ideas for using twitter in the classroom - Sweet Tweets and Twitter Parents

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  7. Thanks for the comment Bob and thanks for the links - two interesting educational uses of Twitter.

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