http://keepstream.com
The basics
Keepstream is “a social media curation tool that helps organize tweets, Facebook posts, and website bookmarks into shareable, embeddable collection pages. Collections are useful for bloggers, marketers, or just about anyone who wants to curate the chatter from a conference or event, a news headline, or a hashtag chat.” The key value of keepstream is its capacity to make the ephemeral more permanent.
Keepstream usefully allows you to embed a stream of hashtag-related content into a blog or other website. Crucially, it allows you to create collections of important tweets, such as those relating to a particular event, or perhaps a concept. An example I created from tweets searched for with the hashtag #web20 and learning:
A collection related to web2.0 and learning
I have in most cases avoided any reference to Twitter-related applications in this website (there are, literally, hundreds which amplify and make Twitter more usable). However, Twitter shows no sign of ‘going away’: the problem will be, like Facebook, that it becomes a very rich part of people’s lives and therefore may become difficult for use within education. I suspect that people will need to learn to have several Twitter accounts, at least one for study.
A useful discussion of Keepstream at Instructional Design Fusions blog
What needs to be explored
Keepstream makes Twitter more useful and effective: the real exploration is what can Twitter do. Keepstream is very easy to use with the only exception that it sources ALL of the twitterverse when searching. Therefore, we need to explore how to more accurately search for tweets and create groupings of people worth following, so that Keepstream’s search parameters can be refined.
Pedagogic Challenge
The challenge is, principally, getting over the hurdle of ‘what is Twitter for?’. If all that we think it can do is promote celebrities, market products or allow random and often pointless commentary on people’s own lives, then Twitter doesn’t make much sense. However Twitter is increasingly being used for scholarly interaction in which tweets are used to point readers to websites of interest, make critical and pithy comment and to manage social interactions around knowledge work. Once the challenge of understanding Twitter is overcome, then the work begins: how can lecturers fragment their content delivery into tweets which are then delivered to students in a temporally distributed manner and which, through the links they contain, direct students to other interesting places? How can students, using something like Keepstream, use Twitter to curate a collection of relevant information, with brief commentary and then display it in one place for ease of access?
Alternatives
Some Twitterstream aggregators are discussed at the TopRank marketing blog: however aggregators are not quite the same as Keepstream, because Keepstream requires some curation and collection management (hence activating the students’ cognitive faculties). Paper.li could be an alternative, creating a ‘newspaper’ result that is the output of tweets.
