Moodle and Twitter
Want to make Moodle and Twitter talk in a basic way? Very simple, just turn on RSS feeds in your forums and run it through a Twitter account. If your system administrator is too busy fighting fires in the server room (i.e. playing online games with Troll in the title) to enable RSS there is an even simpler way. Use Twittermail to update a twitter account by setting this as the email address of a user subscribed to a Moodle forum with email alerts enabled. TA-DA your Moodle forum is now streaming to Twitter. Of course this means you are pulling Moodle conversations into Twitter which is just a one-way stream. Your students can’t talk back from Twitter to your Moodle forum which would be ideal. If you want full on realtime web streaming chat you all need to be in twitter - up to your necks.
More on how to use Twitter and Moodle, email to RSS, email fitlers etc.
“Use Twittermail to update a twitter account by setting this as the email address of a user subscribed to a Moodle forum with email alerts enabled.”
Now, there’s a FERPA lawsuit just waiting to happen
Steve
http://www.moodleus.org
[...] Source: http://www.relearn.ie/2008/10/07/moodle-and-twitter/ [...]
What is a FERPA lawsuit Steve?
[...] have been thinking about Moodle and Twitter lately. They share something in common. From a certain vantage they both look like a stream of [...]
Any learning tool that sends emails with student posts in it could be misused in this way.
This should be part of the University’s student handbook or code of student conduct or something, as students can simply publish collaborative papers in violation of FERPA as well.
Hi Robert, You are correct, there are data privacy issues. Everything is recorded online unlike in the physical classroom.
You have hit the nail on the head in that there are no technological solutions to this problem. They are a legal, process and policy issues where user education and training are key. Everyone involved must be aware of privacy and intellectual property issues. We do make students aware of the guidelines and rules for usage of computers and electronic correspondance. However I am begining to think that this shouls be more explicit. Say maybe something they have to agree to when they log into Moodle the first time every semester.
Here in Ireland FERPA will not apply but there would be corresponding laws I’m sure.
I am poking around in Moodle looking at ways to increase modes of learning and to me these are intersting things you can do to give more flexibility to learners.
Thanks to the commenters here for pointing out potential security holes which I didn’t even think about at first!
The reverse direction might be possible too, at least as far as the course page if not the forum: authenticated RSS feeds out of twitter and/or twitter’s javascript (see eg http://code.google.com/p/twitterjs/downloads/list), running in a block.
Thanks @Miles. I look forward to checking that out.
[...] wrote a recent hack for using Twitter to turn Moodle forum postings into SMS messages. This no longer works in Europe. [...]