Well done to Ivy Bean who at well over 100 (103 or 104 depending on which source you read) may be the oldest person on Twitter according to this story in the British tabloid newspaper, The Sun.
While her tweets about daily activities at Hillside Manor care home in Bradford where she lives, may not be that exciting she has amassed a huge number of followers since her first tweet on May 14 (over 11,800 already). Apparently she switched to Twitter after getting bored with Facebook and her enthusiasm for technology has inspired other residents at the care home to have a go. It just goes to show you're never too old to try something new!
You can see what Ivy is up to at twitter.com/IvyBean104
I live in a small coastal community near Dunedin with my husband and two beautiful children. Dunedin is a small city located in the South Island of New Zealand. We have a small lifestyle block with a patch of native bush and several sheep. There's always lots to do; currently we are extending the house, developing a vegetable garden and trying to get rid of the gorse.
I work part-time at Otago Polytechnic in the Educational Development Centre and support staff in developing online learning programmes and resources. Prior to this I taught bioscience (human anatomy and physiology) and environmental science to tertiary students in foundation and undergraduate health science programmes and technician training courses.
Academic background:
Grad. Cert. in Applied eLearning, Manukau Institute of Technology (currently completing)
PG Cert. Tertiary Teaching, University of Otago (2006)
Dip Grad, Education, University of Otago (1993)
BSc (Hons), First Class, Physiology, University of Otago (1987)
Professional experience:
Educational Developer, Educational Development Centre, Otago Polytechnic (2008 - current)
Course Advisor/Writer/Editor (contract), Flexible Delivery Projects, Otago Polytechnic (2006 - 2008)
Senior Lecturer, Otago Polytechnic, School of Natural Resources and Science (2000 - 2005)
- Programme Manager: National Diploma in Science (2004 – 2005)
- Teaching experience: Bioscience, Environmental Science for National Diploma in Science (NDS) and Bridging Health students (Biology Units Level 4–6; Core Health Units Level 4)
Lecturer, Otago Polytechnic, Applied Science and Technology Department (1991 - 2000)
- Teaching experience: Biology, Anatomy and Physiology for various student groups (NDS, Health Sciences, Sport’s Studies)
- Teaching experience: Anatomy and Physiology for Nursing students
Have started tweeting? or maybe twittering? not sure of the correct terminology yet, but these are small posts (microblogs) of 140 characters or less updated on your twitter page that all your followers can view.
So how is twitter being used? You can ask a question, provide a link to something interesting, send out reminder post about a meeting/event, or simply tell everyone what you are up to.
Leigh introduced twitter at the last social media class, in the hope this might be an easier way for newbies to start interacting with others before getting going on their own blogs.
Sign up, fill in your profile details, then you can find people to follow. Clicking on someone's username takes you to their twitter page and you can see their recent posts and also who they are following; a click of a button and you can follow them.
Firefox allows you to install Twitterfox (see under the Tools menu, Get Add-ons and search for twitterfox) so tweets automatically pop up in the lower right of your screen. Clicking on the twitterfox icon (see red arrow below) shows you a list of recent updates, and you can post/reply from here.
Here's a neat example from an Auckland primary school teacher of what can happen with twitter: pirates ahoy . Sounds like a lot of fun!
A couple of weeks ago at the Socially Constructed Media course some participants were talking about iGoogle. It's like a one-stop page that shows your feeds and all sorts of other useful gadgets. My iGoogle homepage has links to my google reader, google docs, news sites, wikis, flickr, YouTube and lots of other stuff, all organised on one page. 
It only take a few minutes to set up your own iGoogle homepage at www.igoogle.com. This YouTube video will get you started.
Here's a video from YouTube about podcasting that Jean in the SocialMedia class found.
Although traditionally considered to be audio 'broad'casts, podcasts are essentially any internet media (audio, video etc) that you can subscribe to, like you do with Google Reader. You can use a podcatcher like iTunes to catch the podcasts onto your computer which can then be downloaded onto an iPod.
Back at the Social media course tonight and I have failed miserably on posting anything to this space in the last two weeks (note to self, must try to set aside some time!).
But to be fair I have been busy keeping up with the Educational Design for eLearning course and learning about Moodle (Learning Management System) and eXe (a freely available Open Source authoring application for publishing web content). There's lots of things to blog about and I plan to share all of this through this site.
This week we have looked at wiki's (collaborative webpages), starting with wikipedia the online encyclopedia. Leigh who teaches this course encouraged everyone to check out their own subject area on wikipedia and start engaging with the content by editing. Check out Otago Polytechic wikieducator site and some of the course development going on at the polytech.
At the Socially Constructed Media class on Tuesday night we embedded a YouTube video and here it is.
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