a7eleven

My other Twitter-based game at the moment is slightly more elaborate. TwitStory involves using other people’s tweets as the basis for a short story.

Some terminology… ‘twitsurf’ is a verb meaning to browse Twitter by clicking on interesting looking pics in people’s ‘following’ list.

The rules for TwitStory are as follows:

• Play using the Web interface to Twitter.
• Find a starting point, e.g. by twitsurfing 5 or 6 times at random.
• Copy and paste one of the tweets visible on the current page. (Optionally note down the Twitter name of the person who made the tweet).
• Now twitsurf once or twice (your choice). Note that protected updates pages can be skipped over at no cost.
• Copy and paste another tweet.
• Repeat until you have up to 15 tweets that make a story.
• Reaching a dead-end, i.e. a person with no followers, marks the end of the story.
  

I’ve tried this twice so far. Not sure about the results but, hey, I’ve heard of people doing stupider things on the Internet!

TwitStory 1 - Heading for Mexico

Pip is attempting to tell me that someone fell down the well. Unfortunately, she is no Lassie and her communication skills suck.I’m sweating and unhappy about that.

husband just got home

Annie is trying to figure out what the heck this thing is?

strange weather, thunder and lighting which sounds different to normal MCR thunder

wishes that global warming would stop melting all the snow around here so damned quickly.

LA is melting me

Unbelievable!!!

Dear God. I am so tired.

Feeling pretty sick today. This cold is a month late

Time to get me some L:Qdoba

going to hang out with my little sister.

Sweating in the windy city

Embarked and en route to Mexico on ship.

Closing out this “could’ve been worse” Monday, see you manyana amigos and amigas

TwitStory 2 - Tokyo angst

No I don’t have a gun.

God I hate this loft.

Back in Tokyo

ha ha ha ha ha. Now that’s classy!

My body arrives back tomorrow morning, the rest of me a little bit later

WTF is this about!??!

Wow, this is great stuff. An author torrenting his own stuff? Sweet!

Yes, I know I am going to hell

griping about the griping about the griping…

I’ve forgotten that sometimes I really do enjoy talking for four hours straight to complete strangers

Want to scream,

apparently complaining helps to motivate me. not good for others.

Is calling it a night.

Unfortunately, I didn’t record the TwitStory social path taken to make either of these stories.

In my copious spare time I’ve invented two Twitter-based games. The first, TwitLyrics, is a game for one (but everyone else has to watch, obviously). The rules are easy. Simply twitter your favorite lyrics, replacing words with ‘Twitter’ or ‘Tweet’ to taste.

I suggest only doing this once a day to avoid being bludgeoned to death by irate Twitter followers.

There’s no winner (only losers!).

I played all last week. Here’s what I came up with…

Tuesday

The moment i wake up / before i put on my makeup / i tweet a little tweet for you

Wednesday

but i would tweet 500 times / and i would tweet 500 more / just to be the man that tweets 1000 times / to fall down at your door

Thursday

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end / To be stuck inside of Mobile / With the Twitter blues again

Friday

Alison, I know this world is killing you / Oh, Alison, my tweet is true

I’m grateful to follower @mweller, who responded to this last one with:

@andypowe11 - ‘Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from tweeting/ when I hear the silly things that you say’ (not really of course)

which put me fairly and squarely in my place. I’ll get my coat…

We watched Life is Beautiful at home on DVD on Saturday night. Great film. Very funny. Very sad. I meant to watch it ages ago but then forgot about it until one of Daisy’s friends suggested that we watch it because Daisy has been reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

I was somehow expecting the second half of the film to be more gritty than it was. Harder. I found myself laughing when Guido mis-translates the German officer when they first arrive at the camp - then thinking, “hang on, should I be laughing at this?”. But that didn’t detract from it - just made it different to what I was expecting.

Anyway, well worth watching if you haven’t seen it.

Likewise, I’m Not There, which I went to see at the Little Theatre in Bath last week. Took me right back to my days of listening non-stop to Bob Dylan. Fantastic. Cate Blanchett rocks! I hadn’t read any of the blurb before going, so although I knew she was in it, I didn’t realise what part she was playing. Suffice to say it took me ages to work it out :-). I have to confess, this is one of the few films I can recall where I would have been quite happy to go back the next day and watch it again.

The current strapline being blasted at us by the BBC is “making the unmissable, unmissable”, thanks to the iPlayer of course.  Unmissable for 7 days that is!

I’m still playing with the theme for this blog. The current one (which I got from the ’salmon’ section of the Wordpress theme viewer) is by Steffen Becker. It was originally in German so I’ve had to translate a lot of the user-interface language to English. I’ve probably missed stuff - apologies in advance if you suddenly have to switch into German mode…

I blogged earlier over on eFoundations about plagiarism which seems to have hit the UK headlines in no uncertain way today. I have a personal as well as work interest in this. In my role as chair of governors at Newbridge Primary School I guess I need to be encouraging some thought about what the school’s policy is (and should be) in this area.

In general terms I think staff are pretty good about information skills and, as I mentioned in the other post, they certainly encourage children to create a short bibliography at the end of longer pieces of topic-based homework, indicating which sources of information have been used. This is good.

The evidence from the recent JISC report on information skills seems to be that the earlier these kinds of skills are addressed, the better. So in some ways, primary school level seems like a good place to start thinking about it. But it clearly needs to be backed up and enhanced as children progress through secondary school, college and university.

My guess is that even at primary school level the copy-and-paste habit is already beginning to be learned. The school probably needs to be explicit and consistent in not encouraging that to happen?

Ooo… this is exciting. A blog of my very own that isn’t work-related or about Second Life. Not sure how long I’ll keep it up but I’m willing to give it a good go.