rElearn

I have been thinking about Moodle and Twitter lately. They share something in common. From a certain vantage they both look like a stream of babbling data. People frequently complain about the amount of emails they get from Moodle forums or how they can keep up to date with active Moodle forums and not get swamped. Twitter has this problem too in that once you follow a certain threshold number of people the stream gets disorientating. This stream of chatter is what makes Twitter different and interesting as a medium however it also has tools to let you manage the flow.

The beauty of Twitter is that you can unsubscribe (unsub) anyone you are not interested in. But not only that because Twitter is based on RSS feeds you actually have very powerful filtering tools to hand. If you are a power RSS user Twitter will make sense to you and you will have strategies for pulling the twitter feeds of most interest to you while ignoring the rest. (Of course one of the beauties of twitter is that you can go on a tangent and expand a scrap of interesting conversation that you see in the periphery of your vision to find new friends and conversations).

How could you filter Moodle in the same way? Gain some control over large and active discussion forums while extracting the best bits from them? One way to do this is by using email filters to route your Moodle discussions into feeds.

Step 1: Forward to GMail
- Go into the email account that is in your Moodle profile
- Set it to forward all mail to a GMail account

Step 2: Use GMail filters
- Create GMail email filter so that all emails from Moodle skip your GMail inbox. This will keep you sane.
- Now become acquainted with GMail email filters. For instance you could forward all emails from a certain Moodle discussion forum to TwitterMail. This would allow you say to get SMS alerts of what is happening in a forum with vital information such as “assignment is due five minutes ago/tutorial is cancelled”.

A Twitter account of course is just an RSS feed. So, in one sense, what Twittermail really is is an email to RSS tool. Have you ever wanted to get an RSS feed of a mailing list? Simple just forward the mails to a Twittermail account and subscribe to the associated Twitter user.
What does this mean for Moodle discussions? Well it means you can create feeds from discussion threads yourself. The power is yours. You don’t need to wait for your Moodle admin to do this for you. This is the power of web 2.0. The only limit to what you can do is your imagination.

Once you start thinking like this about email filters, RSS, SMS, Twitter and Moodle discussion forums you can see limitless possibilities. And none of this is rocket science. No programming is involved.

We have the tools. The web is truly here. Let’s use it.