I listen to a podcast called This Week in Tech (TWiT), hosted by Leo Laporte and few other tech writers and hosts of their own shows (if you don’t listen to TWiT and you’re interested in tech, I’d definitely recommend it). There are 2 things I specifically want to mention about 2 of the recent shows that I listened to.
Towards the end of TWiT 197 “Steal this diploma”, the panel had a discussion about the changing nature of higher education (clicking the link will open the transcript for the show…search for “how pedagogy is changing”). I think if you’re reading this blog then you might find that to be an interesting conversation.
The second thing I wanted to mention is that I’ve been following the tweets from the Personal Democracy Forum conference (#pdf09) after listening to TWiT 199 “I’m a dinner jacket” earlier today. I’m not exactly new to Twitter (although I don’t post as often as some, or follow people who talk about their breakfast) but there was something that I didn’t exactly get until today. I’ve used Tweetdeck to create a search for “education” and “technology” but haven’t been very impressed with the results. Now I realise that it’s only searching for phrases that contain those key words. We also used Twitter to follow each other on the Mozilla Open Education course I participated in a few months ago, but still I didn’t get it. It was only today that I realised that I can use it to follow events in real time, kind of eavesdropping on a conversation between everyone who’s actually there. I’m realising more and more how incredibly powerful Twitter is, not as a tool, but as a communications platform. You can also read this article in Time magazine about how Twitter is changing the way we communicate.
Comments
4 responses to “TWiT and Twitter conversations (no relation)”
Ya, good point about the browser open. the video for which is also streamed live. I am on Friendfeed but don’t really spend much time on it.
Yeah, good point about having to keep the browser open. That’s a drawback for sure. It would be nice to get FF convos in Gwibber or some such app, but no such luck yet. I am not a devoted fan of TWIT, but I have checked out the FF TWIT convos in the past to see how it works when lots of people participate in a live instance. FF could actually be a pretty useful collaborative tool for convos at scientific conferences, if we could get enough scientists to embrace a little social tech. The name “Friend Feed” might not be the best to attract professionals though.
Hi Elena. I don’t follow the live TWiT shows, as the bandwidth in South Africa isn’t great even for audio streaming, let alone video. I download the podcasts and listen to them while driving, and then there’s no real incentive to go and follow the conversations afterwards. I’m on Friendfeed but don’t really spend much time on it. I hate the idea of having to have the page open in the browser all the time.
Hi Michael,
Have you followed the Friend Feed conversations for TWIT? They occur during the live taping of the podcast, the video for which is also streamed live. Friend Feed functions even better as a communication platform in some cases.