twoLER

British Computer Society – Sociotechnical Specialist Group host

Social Software inside the Enterprise – does it have a role?

By

Ian McNairn

Wednesday  Feb 10^th 2010

London Venue:

Marylebone Road. (Opp. Baker Street Station, and Mme Tussauds)

Time: 6.15pm – 8.00pm including questions. Cost:Free.  All welcome!

Especially PG students.

Room: M228  Tea/Coffee/Biscuits available.

Directions from Security

To ensure a place, register as soon as possible with: coakese@westminster.ac.uk

Past lectures on www.bcs.org/sociotechnical and updates on the group’s activities

It’s been a bumper month with a lot of different things going on with Twoler.

The month started off with working out who won the “You Mix, We Use, You Win” – TWOLER Challenge. Thank you all for participating in the competition and those of you who attended workshops during the 1^st semester of 2009/10 year.  We had over 40 entries over 400 votes and thousands of hits to the entries. Working out how to judge the finalists and then running the judging session, which came up with a few surprises as to who they thought should win. Thanks to David Gauntlett and Luca Paderni (Google) for taking the time to look at the entries.

The winners to the competition are listed on the previous post on this blog and on the project site

We ran our first staff event – “Google Apps – Internal Showcase” which was attended by over 20 members of staff wanting to find out how the Google Apps environment could benefit them. It was received well and demand for another event is growing.

The month also consisted of creating our “little book”. We started of trying to think of names for the book. We initially had “It’s not your fathers internet… and other titles”, then “Diginac” but then finally decided on “Student 2.0 Recipes in H.E.” Below are some pictures taken whilst deciding on the order the different pages should go in.

Recipes book creation

We had great fun and long hours writing and creating the book which we just got done in time to take up to the final JISC Institutional Innovation event that took place in Aston.

Recipes book creation 3

We can also report we WON the team that sold the most products at the trade fair that took place during the event. Thanks to all those that tweeted about the project and the little book….. (we’ve had over 500 hits since we launched the recipes book site launched last week!)

Tweets about Twoler Recipes

Tweets about Twoler 2

Tweets about Twoler

Finally after many weeks of developing, 2 extensions and over 40 entries, we finally have the winner. 4 teams, 8 individuals and the winners are….

When you are submitting your entries to the competition, can you please make sure that they are things that you have created and not existing websites/services that have been created by someone else. They may be very useful for students, but we are looking for your creations. Thanks.

There are many great websites out there that provide useful services for students, please post them on the TWOLER facebook page to show others what the  possibilities are.

Please keep the competition entries coming in. Remember the deadline for submissions is 22nd November 2009.

Well it’s been a while since I posted anything to the blog, apologies for that, been busy planning for the start of the competition and events that will be taking place during the remainder of the Twoler project.

Two weeks we had the final Show & Tell session with the studentships students working over the summer. Thank you all that attended and got a final chance to see the great projects that have been created.

I had the chance to meet with staff from the school of life sciences to help promote the competition and hopefully get them to promote the competition and get more Biosciences students on board. Now all I have to do is get my foot in the door for all the other schools.

Well the competition submission form is now live and we already have a number of contenders. We are recovering from a packed fresher’s week this week, where the team got to meet new and returning students to tell them about the competition. Hopefully the plying of sweets and mention of big money prizes will entice you all to enter the compeition.

Here are some nice mash-ups done with Twitter…

http://mashable.com/2009/09/26/twitter-art/

Twitterfeed.com is a tool which automatically posts links to new blog posts in Twitter.

I have set this up an account to post new blog entries here to the Twoler Twitter feed.

So, this post should appear in Twitter shortly after posting here.

Did you read it here first, or have you come from Twitter?

The output of a number of the TWOLER RSS feeds can be modified by changing parameters in the URL.

For examples modules in the school of Biosciences is returned by:

http://feeds.westminster.ac.uk/rssbus/pub/modules_by_school.rsb?@rss&param:school_code=BIO

This can be modified to modules of the Law school by changing the three letter school code to LAW:

http://feeds.westminster.ac.uk/rssbus/pub/modules_by_school.rsb?@rss&param:school_code=LAW

Currently these changes have to be made manually but for those users of feeds unfamiliar with URL syntax we are looking at a user interface for generating the feed and its output.

As part of the investigation I have made use of Yahoo! Pipes to manipulate the feed by allowing the user to enter the school code in a web form.

The form is here and the output can be manipulated by entering school codes such as ABE, LAW, BIO, EIC, HBS etc. in the “Enter School Code” field and clicking the Run Pipe button.

The Yahoo! Pipe application requests the parameter and inserts it into the URL. It recognises the parameters in the feed and allows the input feed to be mapped easily.

If the output is satisfactory for the user then the feed URL can be retrieved for use in a mash-up.

We had a great competition planning meeting last week, where we thrashed out all the different avenues of advertising the competition to student’s and staff. The best part was the brainstorming session we had afterwards to pick a slogan for it all.

You mix, we use, you win

We have a twoler twitter account which was created ages ago, I’ll be tweeting as much as possible from now. You can follow us on http://twitter.com/twoler

Here’s a great posting on 10 ways to archive your tweets (twitter messages)…

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_ways_to_archive_your_tweets.php