So you know how you hear about something for the first time... and then all of a sudden you hear about that same thing from a bunch of people all at once? That's what happened to me with Wakelet: I saw Alice Keeler mention it as a useful tool to use for curating conference Twitter traffic and then, boom, I heard about it from lots of people, including @karen_bowden here at the Community.
So, what is Wakelet? It's the new Storify, which means it is a tool for curating content from Twitter (and other online sources) so that you can take the transitory, high-speed, here-today-gone-tomorrow content of Twitter and turn it into something more permanent that you can share easily.
It's VERY user-friendly: you can log in with a Google account and start creating. To make my #InstCon Wakelets, I searched on Twitter content for that hashtag and then added the resulting items. You can do other kinds of editing and add other kinds of content, but as a newbie I stuck to something simple!
I am pleased to say that you can easily embed a Wakelet in a Canvas course Page, so that's what I have done at my InstructureCon Remote Control site; I've actually got two Wakelets so far of #InstCon tweets, where I have the most recent one embedded on the left, plus links on the right:
Wakelet: InstCon Remote Control
I used a sneaky trick here, which is that to embed the Wakelet javascript, I saved it as an HTML file that I uploaded to the Files are of Canvas (just like for a Twitter widget; details here at Twitter4Canvas). And in the future, when I update that to display a more recent Wakelet, I'll just replace the HTML file in Canvas with a file of the same name and, presto, that will allow me to display a more recent Wakelet with a single file upload. Click... it's updated! (At least, that's how it should work: I will report back on that when I create my next InstCon Wakelet).
There's also a Wakelet app that I've added to my phone, which I might try to make use of during InstructureCon.
Does anybody have thoughts on Twitter Moments (part of the Twitter ecosystem itself) versus Wakelet? The media rendering and editing options are clearly WAY superior in Wakelet, so I'm pondering if I should stop using Twitter Moments (which are very clunky) and go with Wakelets instead.
Anyway, that's something to ponder. For now, tweet on, everybody!
And here are my Twitter 10 leading up to today:
1 #InstCon and the InstructureCon App
- Reference
- Community Guidelines
- Security
- Developers
- Open Source
