My Day

Am learning from a SLOAN-C brown bag in Second Life about a cool mash-up for those of you who are considering more innovative, learner-centered learning spaces.  Remember the Milk - http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ - an online task manager (like Outlook) that you can share with other users  - it is a web 2.0 tool compatible with Twitter (http://twitter.com).  If you assign groupwork, and your students tend to be addicted to their cellphones, then this is a tool for you!  This lets students communicate for a group project while the instructor can see who actually is doing the work!  Magic!

 

Twitter can be fed into "Remember the Milk" and the instructors could see who was doing what work and what group chat was like and if everyone got the messages about the group work.  This does away with the complaint: "Well, no one ever told me what to do or no one ever contacted me to do that portion of the project."  And, regular tweets motivate the lagging participants to keep up.

 

Another idea is to use this mash-up with a research class as a way to communicate regularly with a research librarian assigned to the class.

 

P.S.  A new article on the use of Twitter feeds to watch the proceedings of a conference for Higher Ed  - at a distance because the author couldn't go to the conference herself - Twitter is not just for geeks anymore!