#writing

light487

December 29, 2008, 08:25 AM

Yeh sure.. there is a great person to follow @pinyin who often posts phrases each day and happily answers questions on writing. Also I often use twitter to write hanzi attempts.. :) Plenty of people to correct my sentences on there.. :)

 

hankfdh

December 29, 2008, 08:35 AM

We have been using Yammer in the office and have found it to dramatically speed up internal communications. We have been looking at adding micro-blogging to CPOD to achieve the same thing, but it also seems like it might be a good way to address basic conversational writing. I guess old-school Eliza left an impression on me »  http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html!

light487

December 29, 2008, 09:07 AM

I think that using # tags would assist with that side of things, such as #cpod_pinyin or #cpod_hanzi or #cpod_help etc.. or something like that anyway..

The only problem I can see with Yammer is that people know that you are watching them, as the network is limited to those with the same corporate email suffix.. whereas with more public micro blogging systems, there is less pressure on the micro blogger to watch what they say.

On Twitter I don't care a lot about what I say, even though it's a lot more transparent and easily accessible by ANYONE who cares to follow me. I could of course lock my account so that only people I know can see but this again leads back to the initial problem of "watching what you say".

I think it is this true freedom of speech that gives Twitter users the ability to say anything that pops into their heads at the time.

Interfaces for accessing Twitter, such as TweetDeck allow me to granulate the feed into useable data streams but ultimately you get out of it what you put into it... just like anything.

 

hankfdh

December 30, 2008, 01:20 AM

@light487,

The thing is I believe there might be benefits to segmenting the broader community into smaller groups. In an enterprise context (e.g. Yammer), I tweet on work related issues that don't need to (or shouldn't) go outside the company. In a language learning context, you could imagine how a similar limitation might help offline classes of students with informal knowledge sharing. Or perhaps putting fences around tweets from commenters at different academic levels. Encourage newbies to Tweet in pinyin, encourage advanced users to write in Hanzi.

Just brainstorming a few ideas here.

light487

December 30, 2008, 02:19 AM

Of course.. I wasn't trying to suggest it was a bad idea or that it couldn't work, I just see that it could change the dynamic of Twitter usage. I can definitely see the benefits in what you are suggesting and I believe it is definitely worth pursuing further investigation into finding some methods of segmentation.

Smaller focus and specialised groups would definitely add to the confidence of the individuals within the groups and so hopefully increase the communication frequency and connectivity of the workers, learners, friends, associates etc.

My point was more to do with the dynamic of usage changing when the individual knows that they are in a different context. When you speak with your customers, you are less likely to speak in the same way as you would with your close friends. So creating "context" based rather than "interest" based groups may be the way to look at segmenting.

Also just brain-storming.