Recently in my Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Core II course at the Graduate Center, the class showed off their many gadgets – including many microphones and video cameras – but also new-to-me tech such as Jack Power’s fly pen and my Jennifer Jacob’s arduino. My professors, Chris Stein and Joe Ugoretz, also demonstrated the capabilities of their iPads. I was instantly fascinated by an app that aggregates information from your social media networks into a daily newspaper. While an iPad is still on my wish list, I was determined to find a similar product for PC users. Luckily something came through my Goggle Reader that linked to Paper.li . Essentially, the program searches for twitter hastags or facebook mentions and organizes the results into the familiar aesthetic of an online newspaper. My first experiment, albeit unoriginal, was to create a newspaper for #edtech via my twitter account. Here it is:
I consider this to be very successful. The information is relevant, interesting, and easy to read. In fact, the first issue led me to this article on “The Future of Higher Ed” that is relevant to at least two projects I am currently working on in my courses. However, even though it is free to use, it is ad supported, and the ads are less-than-desirable. For a student like myself who is interested in a topic that is very current, this is an excellent research tool. It is similar to using Google Alerts or RSS feeds, but streamlined with a greater readability. I am wondering how this could be used in a my English and composition classrooms, or as a feature of an LMS/VLE…? If you have some ideas or are already using a similar application please share your thoughts!
Joe is your professor? Say “hi Joe”! I walked his mom’s dog in La Jolla one New Year’s Eve after an MLA convention;-)
Oh, and we worked together at BMCC in the early 90s.
Interesting idea to use as a research tool: most of my students do not use Twitter, but a few may be curious about this. Thanks for the info!
Thanks for posting about this, Amanda! I started using Paper.li about a month ago to organize a couple of feeds from the @cunycommons Twitter account. I learned about Paper.li from Valerie Futch’s post on the TE(a)CH with Purpose @ Bronx CC blog: “Twitter and Classroom Engagement”.
Below are the links to the two feeds I’ve created using Paper.li. The first is a daily feed from a follow list, which aggregates tweets from CUNY twitterers (growing this list is a long term project of mine). The second is a weekly edition of all the tweets from the @cunycommons Twitter account.
The @cunycommons follow list Daily — http://paper.li/cunycommons/cuny
The CUNY Academic Commons Weekly — http://paper.li/cunycommons/cunycommonsweekly
Stacey, I will say hello to Joe in class on Tuesday. Let me know if and how your students use Paper.li.
Sarah, thank you for the links! I subscribed to the Commons Weekly, which seems quite useful.
Great article and information.I appreciated it!So helpful information sharing to all.God bless you.Amen
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maybe social media newspaper could have beat facebook 🙂 nice article.