Steve over at Pedablogy has an insightful post about note-taking, an activity that I find crucial for my own cognitive focus and ordering when I’m at any kind of presentation. Lately I’ve found that tweeting is a great form of social note-taking, as I can get back my notes *just from me* but at the same time enjoy the benefit of a kind of more-or-less synchronous conversation about the notes as I take them. I’ve even gotten great feedback about the clarity of my attention and articularion from the remarks of my Twitterfriends who are not present at the event. It’s an interesting exercise, like trying to describe a sight to someone over the telephone (that is, before we had the ability to just take a picture and send it along–which frankly, I prefer, even though I love the verbal challenge).
So given that experience, given what Steve says, given the Twitter experiment done by the history prof. at UT-Dallas, and given my own stubborn insistence on varieties and uses of collective and individual intelligence, I came up with an idea that I can’t quite execute, at least not the way I’d hoped. Perhaps you can help, dear reader.
My vision is to make a way for real time notes, observations, questions etc. to be posted to Twitter, and then to flow from Twitter (via a hashtag feed) into a wiki, automagically, and then be groomed, ordered, shaped, and begun to be answered by students in the class after the class is over. They’d probably be assigned as “wiki managers” or whatever on a rotating basis, but perhaps not. Back back back in the day, I was told that note-taking was the first step and note-revising was the second and even more important step, for there the mind began the process of review, consolidation, assimilation, etc. So my notion is that students will take notes individually and revise notes collaboratively. Not a new vision, really, but the cool part for me is having the aggregation take place more-or-less automagically as a demonstration of the resource we’re all building together whether or not we realize it. I’m convinced that Bruner’s “consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity” depends first and perhaps foremost on consciousness-raising about the fact that we are acting in a communal mental fashion at the same time we’re doing our individual cognitive projects. The automagic part may not work. We may have to rely on copy-and-paste. But it would be cool to do it automagically as a kind of object lesson in the one-and-the-many idea that I’m trying to convey.
Right now I’m stuck with embedded RSS readers within wikis. The readers will bring the Twitter stream in automagically but a) not display all the stream at once (RSS readers typically limit the number of entries shown, for good reasons of course) and b) not embed the Twitter stream within the wiki as clear text–i.e., not write to the wiki. What I’m imagining may well be impossible. My analogy is FeedWordPress and other republishing affordances that will aggregate and republish content. I do understand that writing to a wiki is a bit different–or is it? In any event, I’d be grateful for any leads, ideas, or cautionary advice. The one lead I’ve not run down yet is something with SimplePie writing to a MediaWiki instance. That one I’ll probably investigate this weekend, unless someone here tells me not to bother trying.
EDIT: It occurs to me that an open MediaWiki site can easily be written to by spammers, as I know to my sorrow. I wonder if there’s a way to use this openness for my own purposes–while of course I’ll need to be vigilant about the spam as well….
Hmmm. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since we discussed it on Twitter the other day.
I think the challenge is one of granularity. Wikis don’t inherently create content “granules.” But both Twitter and WordPress do. The logic of those applications is built on the idea that content can be put into little boxes (tweets, posts) and further mainpulated (ordered, fed, commented upon).
Wikis however are more freeform. Sure there are pages, but each page doesn’t necessarily represent the kind of content granule that a tweet or a post does. In fact, if each page did, it would become kind of cumbersome to read or work with a wiki. If you created a new page on the wiki for each tweet that would completely defeat the purpose of what you’re trying to do, because you want students to get in there and wrestle with the tweets in ways that transcend their original granularity.
I actually think this is kind of an interesting consideration about how we work with these different applications, but I’m afraid I don’t have a solution that I can think of that would allow you to do what you want to.
Well, here’s one more question: Do you want the feeds to continue to refresh after they’ve been pasted into the wiki? In other words, if a students adds a tweet a day after the class discussion and uses the hashtag, do you want it to show up in the wiki? If not, I think the solution may be a bit easier. If you do want that list to continue, I think this gets trickier — if for no other reason than as soon as students start annotating and manipulating items, the feed logic has been “corrupted.” Does that make sense.
Still thinking about this one
I think it’s a great idea, btw. 🙂
It seems doable with likely a custom MediaWiki Extension to use something like SimplePie or MagPie and parse the RSS to insert into a page. You can pretty much put anything in a page you want with a little bit of elbow grease:
http://cogdogblog.com/2008/09/10/anything-in-your-mediawiki-pages/
http://cogdogblog.com/2006/07/14/rendering-rss-inside-media-wiki/
I’m not at the 100% level of understanding what you want to see- it might help if you did a series of mockups on how the process would work.
For example, does the MagicTwitterWikiScript just insert the twitter stream as WikiText into a page? (does it keep appending? or does it create a new page every day?). And does the script do more than grab and insert tweets? Is it then the students work to go in and move the pieces around and add context?
So one way is to use the feature of MW Template pages– the script/extension pulls a twitter stream into a stand along MW page, perhaps as an iFrame so it can scroll– lets call this page TwitterStreamMilton for a search on #Milton.
Then you create another page (or several, you could have students have group pages) and you can insert this content to the page via just:
{{TwitterStreamMilton}}
The students would then be cutting/pasting the bits they want to copy to the body of a page to do their notetaking.
Or are you looking for tweets to be separated into separate little entries on a page with space between them for notes?
Bring some sketches to Vancouver, maybe we can whip something up!
@Martha Great rich considerations, as always. I think that what I want is for the items in the feed to be republished in the wiki, at which point they’re no longer “feed-y.” Just plain text. Just the way FeedWordPress republishes a blog post which then becomes simply … a blog post. A copy or clone of the original, but not the original thing itself as it appears in the original context. So this is a “feed reader” that simply dumps the contents of what it’s “read” into a wiki. It occurs to me that I may simply be repeating myself and not addressing your question. 3 hours of sleep will do that. Sorry!
You and Alan both asked about the feed refreshing. Yes, it should accept continuing use of the same hashtag. But it would be cool if date information came across with the feed so that the new republication would always be in chronological order, no matter what students have done with the previously republished work. As I type that, though, it seems impossible–maybe now I’m understanding what you mean about the feed logic.
OTOH, if each 24-hour period could go into a new page, that might solve one of the problems.
@Alan I should use the search function on your blog more often! Really, I’m gobsmacked. I’m sure I read those posts but of course at the time they weren’t relevant to my immediate needs. Then, need appears, and Alan’s been there and talked about that. Wow. So now that I’ve recovered from my gobsmacking, I’ll try it out and think about what you’ve said.
I’m not sure if this is what you mean by a mockup–it’s a narrative, not a visual, but here goes, and in a downsized ambition:
Students go to class. During and at the end of class, if there’s something they’re not certain about, a question remaining, etc., they use Twitter to post that item or question. They tag it #muddypoint.
I set up a search on Twitter to feed out everything tagged #muddypoint (adding characters to indicate it’s a particular class at Baylor, probably, which is another issue we’ll have to address) into a wiki. After class, then, students can go to that wiki page and begin to sort, clarify, etc. those muddypoints. The wiki page is a workspace in which the raw material comes from a plain-text dump from a Twitter stream. (Bad metaphors there but you know I don’t mean some eco-disaster.)
It may be that I’m just overcomplicating things with some Rube Goldberg contraption that a simple copy-and-paste would address more elegantly. But I’m curious….
Now to try me some of that Levine ingenuity. Thanks!
The simpler way might be:
* You create a Wiki page that is the “holder” call it MuddyPoint305. This is one set with “locked” options in MW, so only you, as wiki admin, can edit. It just contains a special tag like:
muddypoint|baylor
* a custom MW extension is set up to pull in the twitterfeed as RSS to search on all terms inside the tags and display on this wiki page inside preferably an iframe so it can scroll, otherwise, just in page
* You set up a class page that uses the template tags to embed this page at the top, and then the lower part is what is editable
If you wanted to make it accrete content, such script would need some admin script to go in and grab fresh content, and than cache it on the server, and go through some logic to just append new tweets
Might be a little brute force, but I think it can be done
I can just barely stand on tiptoes and begin to grasp what you’re describing, mostly because I really don’t know MW beyond a basic level. I’ve always liked MW and now with these possibilities I’m liking it even more. I will apply Brute CogDog Force and report back soon.
Thanks a bunch. Times like these are great for getting me up the next level of the learning curve. Onward and upward.
There’s a new plugin for Confluence that you should check out. It’s called Viaduct and is currently in alpha release at http://confluence.comalatech.com/display/VIADUCT/Home.
“Use the Viaduct Plugin to collaboratively gather, remark on, and coordinate to turn content items from RSS, Twitter and email into useful, actionable Confluence News posts.”
As I’m looking for a way to display a Twitter #tag stream in a conference wiki I was delighted to find this discussion.
I’m wondering if you found a solution to your question and figured how to accomplish using MediaWiki, please?
And if so how you put the information stream to work.
I’m also interested to learn more about Confluence’s Viaduct solution and how well users are finding that works.
Thanks all for the insights shared.
Jenny Ambrozek..
… who has multiple interests in using wikis for knowledge sharing including an ambitious effort to build a library of thought leading Sustainable Enterprise Initiatives to inspire others here:
http://open-sustainability.org/wiki/WSE
To date the challenge is making the contribution process as simple as possible to build engagement. Any and all suggestions about how to accomplish are appreciated. I’m understanding from the inside out the Wikipedia ratios of readers to contributors.