Vote with Twitter

This is a follow up to my What do you think? post. I had loads of good suggestions from people, with many pointing out that Poll Everywhere can accepts votes sent via Twitter.

polling station
Originally uploaded by secretlondon123

I really like Poll Everywhere and have used it with small sections. The free account for 30 responses is perfect for an average class size. However, I am not sure I'll be able to get funding to use it in lectures with hundreds of students... which is a pity. I was pleased to note though that someone from Poll Everywhere noticed my Tweets and encouraged me to get back to them to talk about costs.

In the meantime, I thought that using unique hashtag on Twitter and counting responses would be a quick and dirty solution that might be good enough for on the fly straw polls. A couple of people suggested possible lines to pursue that didn't involve a full blown programming project involving Twitter's API, so I had a go... with minimal success.

First off the blocks was Stuart Meldrum who suggested pulling the RSS feed from a Twitter Search into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I got so far but couldn't work out how to pull in all the search results. I've published a copy, called Public TwitGraph, which hopefully you can look at. If anyone can tell me what's going wrong, I'd be very grateful.

Next suggestion I tried to follow was from Martin Hawksey who suggested using Yahoo Pipes. Again, I had a go and got as far as adapting someone else's pipe to produce a list of numbers that I thought I might be able to pull into Google Docs to add them up and draw a graph. However, I couldn't get the RSS feed from the Pipe into Google's spreadsheet. Curses! Thankfully, Martin is more skilled with Pipes and has managed to use a hashtag to draw a graph. Brilliant! Stunningly brilliant even!

I can't quite see how he's done it, and I'll need to play with it for a while to see if it scales up, but it looks very promising.

What I really like about all these solutions (or in my case, not quite working solutions) is that they are based on stuff that other people created... stuff that they willingly shared with the Internet community. Yet more proof, if proof is needed, of the value of personal learning networks, Web 2.0 technology, blogs and (last but by no means least) Twitter.

I'm off now to tile a bathroom... but tomorrow, I'll be playing with Pipes. :-)

What do you think?

Personal Response Systems are used in schools and universities to collect opinions, and answers from students. They work like the ask the audience system on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I must admit that I wasn't sure they would be much use until I tried them in a lecture. The response from the students was so positive that I was convinced after one use. However, there are problems. Handing out and collecting the handsets, setting up the software and receivers etc. is all a bit of a pain.

put your hand up if you are having a good time
Originally uploaded by micn2sugars

It occurred to me that since I already have a Twitter backchannel going in many of my presentations, it might be possible to use Twitter to collect student votes.

What's the big idea?
It seemed such an obvious idea that I was sure someone must have already done it... So I spent most of yesterday evening failing to find what I was looking for. I thought you could ask a question and give a unique hashtag for each possible answer. For example, you could ask:

Do you think voting with Twitter is a good idea?
1) To vote Yes, Tweet: @ddm090820 #ddm001
2) To vote No, Tweet: @ddm090820 #ddm002

Something would look for the unique hashtags, count them and then display the votes cast. Simples! Except, I can't find anything that does it. I asked for suggestions from Twitter but nobody could come up with exactly what I wanted. Essentially, I want a free version of Poll Everywhere!

I got quite excited when I found TweetVolume. It seemed to do what was required... until I realised it used Google to search Twitter - not much use if you want real time reporting of the results. If only they had used Twitter Search instead of Google.

My next idea, suggested by Barbara007 on Twitter (in response to my pleas for suggestions), was to search for the tags myself and just count the results. I investigated this too but while Twitter Search tells you how long it took to come up with its results, it doesn't tell you how many hits it finds. I want to use this with groups of over 100 students, so scroll and count is not going to work!

Conclusion
It seems to me I have four options:

1. Talk the TweetVolume people into using Twitter Search instead of Google.
2. Get someone who knows about programming and APIs to write an app for me.
3. Find a live Twitter search tool that tells you how many hits it finds.
4. Give up!

...Unless you know differently. Any suggestions?