Reflections on Teaching

I have freely admitted to “smoking tech crack” when it comes to cell phones to Larry Ferlazzo (who as always is the voice of reason on new technology, thank goodness because I have no sense sometimes). I have really been exploring using cell phones for my own productivity, and connecting with others. I will be going to another tech meeting next week, Discovery Education Network’s National Institute.

There has been some talk of getting together before the meeting, which requires some coordination. I shared how I had started a group tweet here. Steve Dembo is pushing hard for using the new kid on the block, Plurk. Being open-minded, I spent some time there yesterday. My partner in this adventure was Amy Cordova. I can’t believe this woman has FOUR children. She also has an “un-smart” phone, but uses txt/sms a lot. This was good because we discovered that you can post via sms to Plurk, but you can’t view or retrieve from Plurk that way (there is a mobified page for phone browsers at http://www.plurk.com/m). ” Hmm,” I thought. I’ve gotten some great cell phone tips from Liz Kolb, one of which is that you can send an RSS feed to JOTT and it will convert the text to voice. So, I went to my Plurk page, selected Friends and my plurks, then clicked on the magic orange RSS lozenge in the address window, to get the feed url. Copy the url, then go into JOTT. At your dashboard, there is a tab on the right labeled “Feeds”, click on it. Click on “add feeds” , paste in the url, and voila, it’s there. To listen, call JOTT, say, “JOTT FEEDS” and then say the feed name. The speech is not to bad for a synthetic model.

My takeaway is that Plurk may not be great for this application. It’s good for sharing links, and much better for conversations than Twitter. OTOH, for logistics in a large group, and staying in touch on the go, I think Twitter will still be a better choice. My own suggestion is that we use Twitter for meeting up, and Plurk for a back-channel.