#sugsnip – the first three months

Well, April is here and the sun is shining.

To be fair, the sun has shone now, on and off, for a whole month – March being one of the driest on record (apparently). And with April, comes the end of my first three months of submitting #sugsnips on Twitter.

In fact April 1^st was the ninety first; the end of my thirteenth week.

#SugSnip From Chaucer, through calendar changes to French fish – The origins of April Fool’s day are still disputed. http://fur.ly/57aq

I started posting #sugsnips on January 1st with the intention of posting a snippet of information to Twitter every day for a year (See https://eduvel.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/twitter-sugsnip/) and have posted two previous updates (see end…)

I have purposely kept away from posting e-Learning ‘snips’ as I think there are enough people doing that within my community of practice and have tried instead to post an eclectic range of facts, fun and information – ‘stuff’ I hadn’t realised I didn’t know (e.g. the April 1^st #sugsnip) and stuff that I do know, but suspect others don’t e.g.:

#SugSnip Hedge Schools grew out of the Penal laws that forbade education for Irish Catholics.  http://bit.ly/eDAjP6 + http://bit.ly/g6LWAL [I learner this from the magnificent Terry Loane]

I’ve also post facts and information that has always been of interest to me such as the ‘food’ weeks (there’s another coming up tomorrow – 4^th April). These have also been the ones which have received the most interest, with the ‘cheese’ week receiving notice from Jon Traxler, Claire Bradley (2), James Clay, Matt Pearson and Steve Halsted. That week, I also posted four bonus Tweets which supplemented the daily serving.

I’ve begun to use http://fur.ly/ more now as it gives me the chance to post even more evidence of my ‘snip’ without using up too many of the Tweet’s 140 characters. I think the most URLs I’ve crammed in to Fur.ly is six, but it could probably take more. I do wonder though, how people explore evidence presented in this way, as it doesn’t seem overly obvious how to access the packages URLs or how many there are. Any comment?

Responses and comments have been great and it always gives me a sense of achievement when someone RTs or replies: I feel then that I have helped in some (very) small way. And that’s what I see my job as – helping others. I set out to show how techniques such as this (daily, timed snippets of … whatever) could be used to supplement a learner’s understanding.

Anyone doing it (yet)?

1^st update https://eduvel.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/twitter-sugsnip-first-review/

Fur.ly https://eduvel.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/fur-ly/