If you visit the Swansea Learning Lab blog regularly, you may have noticed the Learning Lab on Twitter feature at the right (if you are reading this in a Feed reader, please visit the live blog page now!). At the moment this shows the top 4 “tweets” posted by @swanlearninglab and it is generated from the RSS feed provided by Twitter.com.
Yesterday, a group of us (myself @cpjobling, Helen @HelenMD, and Julia @juliadesigns, where speculating about how to make this Twitter feed a bit more interesting. The basic problem is that only the person logged in as @swanlearninglab can post items to this feed, and although there is more than one of us with the privilege, there aren’t enough to keep the feed active. What would be better, we thought, would be if we were tracking the people in the learning lab rather than the learning lab virtual person.
We looked into Tweetizen and considered setting up a group there, but it would have been limited to 10 users. We thought about using a hashtag #swanlearninglab, but that might require community training. So then, at Julia’s suggestion, we looked into Twitter lists. And this looked like a possible way forward.
A Twitter list is a group of twitter users whose public tweets are followed as if they were a single person. We have set up a community list, called @swanlearninglab/community and added a few selected people to it. Having done this you can access the list directly at http://twitter.com/swanlearninglab/community and send messages to it by including @swanlearninglab/community in a tweet. Twitter also, helpfully, provides a widget that can be used to show the dynamic list:
Now all we need to do is replace the RSS feed by the widget and bob’s your mother’s brother. Instant community. Great if you tweet anyway but don’t want to post a blog posting here.
If you want to be added to the list, just send a direct message to @swanlearninglab or add your twitter handle to the comments.
Where on the Learning Lab would be the best place for this? Where the current feed is on the front page? On the people page? Both? Somewhere else?
I would put it somewhere reasonably prominent – pour encourager les autres 🙂
One can change the colours and dimensions of the widget to match the Learning Lab colours if wished.
You can add the widget to Bb as well if you want.
I have one for the Trinity LRC on Blackboard and one for my Education list
Have a look at the LRC tab and then TEL sub-tab on the Trinity Bb – login not required.
Apart from the places Julia mentions, replacing the Twitter feed on the right of this blog seems an obvious place!
Are there any people in the learning lab community we know who tweets? … there's been no response for my request for handles.