Five days into the course and I’m thinking that the next few days are critical for those who haven’t been connected to people yet. It’s hard to be new, and often an outreach of a hand isn’t seen in the jumble of a crowd. Now, I don’t really think you can ‘make’ community, but I use the word in the ‘maker’ sense. Making people feel welcome, including them in your work, these things are actions you have to take. Here is a suggestion for a thing that you can do to help include our outliers into the #rhizo14 fun.
Week 1 moving to 2 twitter assignment
The excellent Martin Hawksey has once again blown my mind. (not a great struggle you might argue, but nevermind). Below is Martin’s tagsexplorer uh… explorer. In it you will see all tweets hashtagged #rhizo14 and what connections/replies they got. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find as many unconnected tweeters (five sounds like a nice number but YMMV) as you can and reply to them.
- Make sure you’re logged into your twitter account
- Click on lonely dot in Martin’s tag explorer
- Reply to them
- Tell us about it.
It might easier to do this on the Martin’s actual site rather than doing it here. Up to you.
note: I had to take out Martin’s tags explorer here for performance reasons.
Reporting
Please let us know how it goes. I’ve never asked folks to try and do this before, so if any unforeseen happenings happen, come back here and let us know about it!
Great idea, Dave. I’ll do it. One other thing that struck me about myself is that since I’m low on time right now, I’ve often found myself focusing on posts from people I already know and reading those. It’s understandable, given that I want to keep up connections with those people, some of whom I haven’t connected with in awhile. But I also think it’s important to make sure I’m reading and commenting on things by people I haven’t connected with yet, and your post reminded me to do that. One has to pick and choose what one focuses on in a course like this, and now I’m prioritizing both keeping up existing connections and making new ones. Thanks for the reminder!
where and how do you want us to tell about it? I hope tagging suffices and that RTs count too
I just did a few. Two replies, one new follower. Result 😀
Thanks Dave!
TAGSExplorer was borne out of the question ‘where am I’ and hopefully this will give others in the #rhizo14 twitter community a sense of where they are and identify people they find interesting or useful to connect with.
The data for this is read from a Google Sheet http://goo.gl/xmVvT4 which might appeal to people who prefer their data in rows and columns.
The good folks at the MLA have also created this interface for TAGS http://mlaa.github.io/tags-viewer/?0AqGkLMU9sHmLdERIZ1FlU2JIUjNmY3ZOODFFSG54UVE (hit one of the menus at the top to start slicing and dicing)
Hiya, i find it really funny that I “followed” Dave’s suggestion here (talk about enforcing independence!) but it was a cool exercise. First, i realized some are not people(e.g. Youtube, scoopit). Second, i realized some ppl have more attractive twitter usernames than others. Several of the names i picked had already been contacted by others 😉 and so finally after lookig at the google map i thought to look for Arabic names and found another fellow Egyptian whom I just contacted. That is already a result 😉
Really enjoyed the ways folks have connected the distributed learning in the course and all the cool tech to make the learning relations more visible
Love this task. Although I must say that a lot of the single dots are RT that have not simply ‘Retweeted’, but put a RT in front … False isolation …
@aaron You can crank up the visualization to include these but it gets messy http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=tDHgQeSbHR3fcvN81EHnxQQ&sheet=oaw&mentions=true&retweets=true