Carmen Holotescu

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Using Microblogging for Collaborative Learning
Carmen Holotescu Politehnica University of
Timisoara Director Timsoft Gabriela Grosseck
West University of Timisoara Romania
LOGOS Open Conference, Budapest January, 19-20,
2009
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AGENDA

• Presentation Agenda
• Microblogging technology
• Twitter Educational uses
• Microblogging platform Cirip.ro
• An online course
• Conclusions

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Web2.0 / social networks have great impact in
collaborative / social learning ( eLearning2.0 )
RSS/blogs-2004, podcast2005, vlog2006,
video2007, microblogging-2008
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Microblogging is a collaborative technology, a
new form of blogging, with brief text updates of
140 characters, via Web, SMS, email, IM or 3th
party applications - RT interactions between users
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The best known microblogging services
photo http//www.heikkironkko.com/images/yolehti_
jaiku.jpg
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Social networking in 140 characters
twitter

• Most popular microblogging system
• Robust, elegant and simple
• More than 3 million users
• Numerous mash-ups

http//www.flickr.com/photos/44124372363_at_N01/24171
23304/sizes/o
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Twitter Educational uses Classroom
community Collaboration Project
Management Assessing opinion Conference /
research Virtual classroom Learning experiences
Personal Learning Network Reference services
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Cirip.ro - a microblogging platform specially
designed for education and business launched in
March, 2008, by Timsoft

• Educational uses
• information and knowledge management
• courses enhancement
• delivering entire online courses
• collaborative projects in universities
• communities of practice
• ePortfolios.

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• Cirip.ro special features
• public and private groups (courses, projects,
  events, different topics)
• multimedia objects embedding in notes images
  (flickr, tinypic), audio (deezer, vocaroo) and
  (live) video clips (youtube, dotsub, vimeo,
  seesmic), presentations (slideshare, capzles,
  voicethread, flowgram), documents (pdf, doc,xls)
• feeds monitoring (from sites/blogs/social
  networks/seach).

Groups
Feeds
Users

• Personal Learning Environments ( Networks ) of
  users

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cirip2twitter, widget, export notes
Profile
Interactions online, via ciripfox, SMS, mobile,
IM, (MMS), API, twitter2cirip, rss2cirip
PLE users, groups, feeds
Text messages, images, audio, video (live),
presentations, files
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• An online course about microblogging platforms
• Investigations
• integrate microblogging with other Web2.0
  technologies
• microblogging platform as LMS
• course facilitation

Group news announcements materials as LOM/SCORM
objects
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Course elements
announcements materials as LOM/SCORM objects
collaborative exercises
multimedia messages
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Participation
42 members students, teachers, developers,
librarians
1100 messages
built PLNs
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• Collaborative exercises using different Web2.0
  technologies
• puzzle images - flickr, CC
• del.icio.us collection
• video translation - writeboard, dotsub
• comments on voicethread
• tagcloud - wordle
• code of good practices on microblogs - writeboard

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• Conclusions
• Cirip.ro has facilities to deliver successful
  and qualitative online courses and to enhance
  courses the communication, authoring,
  monitoring, statistical facilities make Cirip.ro
  a modern free LMS.
• Facilitating an entire online course or a part of
  a course on such a platform requires specific
  facilitation skills, and collaborative
  technologies knowledge.
• Participants gain important digital and
  communication skills, build PLEs, continue to
  collaborate in community

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• Future work
• Tags will be implemented to classify notes and
  to organize the group messages in topics defined
  by the facilitator.
• Authors intend to develop a specification for
  evaluating students eportfolio and participation
  in courses run or enhanced by microblogging.
• Scenarios for using microblogging together with
  different collaborative technologies in formal
  and informal courses will be modelled using
  Educational Modelling Language.

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