Tom Caswell

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  • Presenting TwHistory at International Seminar of UNESCO Chair in E-Learning

    Last week I met Emma Kiselyova, Executive Director of the UNESCO Chair in E-Learning at the Open University of Catalonia. Somehow we got talking about the historical reenactments Marion Jensen and others have been doing at TwHistory.com. Today I am thrilled that we have been invited to present the project at the 6th Annual International Seminar of UNESCO Chair in E-Learning next month in Barcelona. The focus of the seminar this year will be Open Social Learning, and I think TwHistory will provide a nice example of what can be done with relatively simple, social tools. Here is the proposal:

    TwHistory: Historical Reenactments with Twitter
    Tom Caswell and Marion Jensen

    The TwHistory project began in early 2009 with the first Twitter reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg over a period of several weeks. While history is considered a boring subject by some, others find a great deal of satisfaction in reenacting important moments in history, dressing in old uniforms and marching on preserved battlefields. TwHistory is based on the idea that historical reenactments can take place online and have the same positive effects for volunteer participants and virtual onlookers.

    (more…)

  • Reflections on My Peer2Peer University Experience

    Eight weeks after enrolling in a course at Peer2Peer University, I turned in my final assignment today and paused to reflect. For a first pass, I felt the organization of the Copyright for Educators course was very good. The content was interesting and to the point. Participants were organized into groups based on their location, something that makes sense when dealing with regional differences in copyright. And although I was placed in a group with North American colleagues, I was still exposed to enough international copyright concepts.

    The structure of the CE course was fairly straightforward. Activities were spread out over six weeks, with readings and a case study for each week. Groups were responsible for self-organizing and responding to the case study each week, as well as grading and commenting on the work of the other groups. The final week consisted of creating a case study of our own, along with an answer to that case study. I subsequently found out that these will be adapted and used in future sections of the CE course. A very clever, sustainable course design, I must say!

    Work was meant to be done in groups, and each group was given a wiki page to work out the case study and a blog to post their final answers. A course chat was also provided, but organizing a weekly chat didn’t work well for my group so we abandoned it after the first week. Instead we used long email threads to push ideas back and forth. (I think the course administrators expected to harvest some ideas and feedback from the chat logs, so I got permission from my group and sent them our email threads.) The number of emails seemed to annoy one of our group members, who quickly dropped out. Perhaps an asynchronous discussion board would be more useful in future courses, given the busy schedules most people keep and some people’s apparent aversion to receiving lots of email. I get about a hundred a day… I helps me feel loved 🙂

    While there wasn’t much interaction with the admins, I don’t really think that was the point. After all, I assume it was called Peer2Peer for a reason. The admins did a nice job of setting things in motion, clarifying topics, adjusting groups and deadlines, etc. Their response times varied, but generally I think they were on top of things. I assume they have just as many outside activities going on as the course participants — if not more.

    One thing that took everyone by surprise was the attrition within groups. By the third week our 6-person group was down to three, and soon that became two. But two is enough to provide for interaction, and I worked with an excellent partner. I suppose 50% or higher attrition shouldn’t come as a surprise when you are dealing with busy professionals who are learning for the sake of learning. Reality tends to interfere with such pure motives. Well, almost pure. I was able to arrange independent study credit as part of my PhD program of study, so I had some additional motivation to keep going. Had I ended up alone in my group the experience would have been totally different, but with at least one person to consult the experience was quite satisfying.

  • How I track reuse and let my Flickr photos wander

    flickrlogoPhotography has been a hobby of mine for a long time. From developing the old black and white photos in my basement darkroom to today’s tiny digital cameras. One of the things that is much easier with digital images is sharing. Uploading photos to a site like Flickr makes sharing photos with family and friends very easy. I used to email photos to friends, but now they can go to my Flickr page and view them whenever they want. It changes sharing from a “push” to a “pull” technology. People can set up notifications or use RSS if they want to know when new content becomes available. I also have it set up to put a little blurb on Facebook when I add new photos to Flickr.

    I also like seeing the different ways my amateur photography gets reused by others. For example, one of my photos of the Crab Cooker restaurant in Newport Beach, CA was reused on Wikipedia. Two other images were used on a travel site called Schmap.com. But my favorite reuse photo is one showing a row of three identical houses, all for sale in my old neighborhood in Redlands, California. It really captures the essence of housing crisis, and it has been reused in at least five different places.

    Reuse & Reputation: Can they be tracked?

    They say the more you give the more you get. While my photo sharing isn’t likely to generate anything more than a simple satisfaction of being appreciated, it has implications for reuse in other areas as well. Openness can pave the way for increased reputation in your profession just as easily as in your hobbies. But how do you know if you are making progress? Tracking reuse can be fairly simple if you have a fairly unique username. I have set up a Google Alert to crawl the web and notify me anytime my Flickr username (caswell_tom) pops up somewhere. Of course, this won’t track reuse in print or on password protected web pages, but it’s a start. As my collection grows I keep track by adding a “reused” tag to each of the photos (here is what I have so far). I also add a comment on my image with the URL where the photo was reused. Flickr makes adding tags and comments to your photos very easy.

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    Does greater openness = greater reuse?

    I have learned that unique of obscure photos get reused far more than common ones. And while greater openness does not necessarily translate to greater reuse, I have noticed that people started reusing my photos around the same time I assigned an Attribution-only Creative Commons license to all my photos. It’s just anecdotal, but I didn’t not have any cases of reuse until I made the change from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY. It seems logical that a less restricted license would be more appealing to an online journal, magazine, or other site. Of course, adding metadata also helps. I usually add a few descriptive tags to my best photos. But just as important is my willingness to open up my CC license by only asking for attribution without adding a bunch of other conditions that make reusers nervous. The truth is, I really don’t care if people use my photos commercially. And the odds of them being used for something really offensive approaches zero.

    I collect reuse like some people collect coins. I think it’s fun to see what happens with them. You never know where they might end up. If you have your own story of tracking reuse, please share!

    UPDATE: I just found out that my friend, Julià Minguillón from Barcelona does the same thing! He posts all the places his photos have been reused to delicious, and he has over 160 cases of reuse. Wow!

  • Learning with Twitter is Taking Off!

    Carla Federman, US History Teacher at Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School, is teaching her Cold War class with a new twist this year. She will be reenacting the Cuban Missile Crisis using 15 different Twitter accounts. You can follow the tweets at http://thea.micds.org/twitster/index.php, or if you use Twitter you can follow the individual characters here. TwHistory was the brainchild of Marion Jensen, and started with a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg earlier this summer (press release here). My colleagues at the Open University of Catalonia have been doing interesting work on microlearning with Twitter, including interesting work on using Twitter in language learning by Graham Stanley. They were even able to interview Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Twitter, about using Twitter in education (here and here). So what are your thoughts on microlearning using Twitter?

  • Historical Reenactments – Teaching with Twitter

    I received an email from a school teacher interested in reenacting parts of the Cuban Missile Crisis using several accounts as “actors.” My friend Marion Jensen came up with the concept in early 2009, and together we started the website TwHistory.com. Earlier this summer he single-handedly recreated the Battle of Gettysburg. Since there seems to be some interest in this kind of Twitter reenactment I thought I would explain the process for those who are interested. The technology behind a project like this is fairly simple, and everything but the web hosting is free. Most of the time spent involves researching the events, which is where the real learning happens. Here are the three basic elements to set up a “TwHistory” reenactment project:

    1. Setting up your Twitter “character” accounts:
    Think of your project as a play, and make a list of all the characters you will need. Each of these will need a separate Twitter account, and each account requires a different email address. So you will need several different email addresses to register multiple Twitter accounts. (If you use Gmail, there is a trick to get around this problem. You can fool Twitter into thinking you are using a different email address by adding “+1” or “+something” to your Gmail address. An example would be yourname+something@gmail.com. So if you have 10 Twitter characters you need to set up, you can register one as yourname+1@gmail.com and then register another one with yourname+2@gmail.com, and so on. Gmail will ignore the + and everything after it and promptly deliver a confirmation email for each of your character accounts to yourname@gmail.com.) Before you get started you will also want to set up a main Twitter account and then use it to follow the “Twitter characters” in your project. I called mine “HistoricTweets.” Don’t follow anyone else with this account (other than your characters) and don’t tweet from the project Twitter account or those tweets will show up as well. (Frankly it’s a little tricky to erase an accidental tweet, since it involves digging into the mySQL database to find and delete the problem entry.)

    2. Archiving Tweets on a single web page:
    This is not really a necessity, but it’s nice to be able to show all the tweets in one place, especially to people who don’t use Twitter. Before you can do this part you will need a web hosting provider that can support PHP and mySQL (most can). Something inexpensive like BlueHost.com is fine. I used a free program called Twitster to capture all the tweets. Setting up Twitster is easier than setting up a WordPress blog, so if terms like PHP and mySQL are somewhat familiar to you, then you can probably do it. Download Twitster (http://plasticmind.com/twitster) and set it up using the project Twitter account and following the instructions in the README.txt file (included below). Be sure to leave the hash tag field blank in the setup wizard so that all tweets from anyone your follow with the project account will appear on your Twitster page. The tweets show up with the newest ones first, and there’s not much you can do about that unless you are a programmer. Here are a couple examples:
    http://twhistory.com/gettysburg/
    https://tomcaswell.com/historictweets/

    From the Twitster Installation Guide:
    1. Upload the Twitster files into the directory you want to use. (e.g. http://mysite.com/twitster/)
    2. Bring up that location in your browser. Twitster will bring up a setup wizard the first time you access it.
    NOTE: You may need to make your make your Twitster directory writable (777) so the wizard can create your configuration file. For security’s sake, once you run the wizard, you should delete setup.php and set the main directory permissions back to something safer, like 755.
    3. Fill in the setup form. Leave the hash tag field empty if you want to display all the tweets for those you are following. Click “Set Up Twitster”. You’re done!

    3. Scheduling Tweets:
    Being able to schedule tweets ahead of time is very useful, especially if you are reenacting an even with many characters tweeting around the same time. The best free tweet scheduler program I have found is called TweetMaster (http://www.twtmstr.com) It was developed by a fellow contributor to the TwHistory.com project, and now it seems to have a few extra bells and whistles. This app lets you schedule tweets down to the minute, so recreating an even like the Cuban Missile Crisis could be really exciting (especially when events happen in rapid succession). The other thing I like about this app is that you can set up multiple twitter accounts into groups for easy tweet scheduling. I highly recommend testing whatever timed tweet app you decide to use with a couple fake accounts. That way you know what it can and can’t do for you.

    I hope this helps others get started with Twitter History or other reenactment projects. Please leave me a comment and let me know if you are doing a Twitter project so I can link to it from TwHistory.com.