Microblogging with WEnotes

Figure 1: Screenshot of WENotes illustrating the timeline of an Open Content Licensing for Educators course.

WEnotes (short for "WikiEducator Notes") is a feature used to support OERu and OER Foundation online courses hosted on the WikiEducator website. WEnotes also includes the ability to post micro-messages into the activity timeline of OERu courses.

In this subsection, we explain how WEnotes works and provide you with an activity to test the feature using a live example set up for this tutorial.

Overview

WEnotes generates a live timeline of feeds from different sources and provides the capability to post a microblog message into the course feed directly from WikiEducator.

Figure 1 illustrates a screenshot of the aggregated feed from a previous Open Content Licensing for Educators course offered by the OER Foundation. In this example, you will see posts by:

• Max Gallo, harvested from a Moodle discussion forum;
• Simone Leonard and Wayne Mackintosh who posted on Twitter using the #OCL4Ed hashtag; and
• a post from Monica Rubio directly via the WikiEducator website.

Note: At the bottom of each micropost in Figure 1 you will see the source. Hovering over the timestamp will show the date of the post. Clicking the timestamp will take you to the original source.

The text field box displayed above the microposts in Figure 1 illustrates where WikiEducator account holders can post a WEnote directly to the aggregated course feed.

Trying a post on WEnotes

Activity

Using WEnotes for sharing microposts on OERu courses In this activity you will publish a micropost on WikiEducator which will be included into the #WEnotes timeline displayed on the left. Log in to WikiEducator (Note: Only registered WikiEducator users with a current login session can post to WEnotes. If you don't have an account you can create one now.) After logging in to WikiEducator, click on the text area displayed on the left (The small box which appears above the list microposts). Type a test message, and click on "Post a WEnote" button, for example: I'm testing WEnotes for the <insert course here> Your WEnote post should appear in the microblog stream. Notes If you are posting via WikiEducator, you do not need to include the a course hashtag because it is assigned to a specific course.