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Some Social Media Search Tools I Like: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

Here are some of the tools and apps I like for social media search. Got others? Twitseek: enter a URL, hashtag or keyword and it finds Tweets related to themHashtags.org tracks #hastags and also trends each one and shows you most popular ones Poll Everywhere lets you poll by SMS, Twitter or the Web in real-time. It replaces clunky audience response hardware at events and lets people use their phones to respond. Kikin kills me! It augments Google searches with relevant information from my social media contacts. So, if I'm shopping, I can get opinions, prices, see reviews and more, without ever leaving the product page. There's a good review on Techcrunch. Tweetscan Twitter search tool that updates every second and will send you emails when your keywords are mentioned, or let you back up your Twitter stream, which Twitter purges regularly Twitscoop searches and tracks search terms, can create a graph of results if there's enough data. It'll show the trend for your keyword activity/popularity Tweepsearch twitter profile and bio search by keywords Twitstat searches and also shows search trends Twitter Search (formerly Summize) isTwitter's own search engine, and the advanced version is very robust Backtweets : enter a URL and it finds Tweets that linked to it. Mr. Tweet recommends people to follow, communities to join, communities your friends and followers are in, and hot topics in communities. Tweetmi displays the most active Twitterers and top stories from the people you follow. So it's a personalized aggregation of your feed, displaying the the real-time conversation. One Riot is a real-time search engine that crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, matches them to trending topics on Twitter or ones you search. Collecta does a real-time meta search on topics you choose, and, unlike most other search tools, saves your searches for future use.

One final comment, a funny one.  On Monday, in my "Twenty-First Century Literacies" class where laptops are required for a whole range of experiments and inclass collaborative work, I caught one of my students with his laptop open and with a book propped secretly inside it, reading away in his book when he should have been paying attention.   So maybe that's the next class, "Should Professors Allow Students to Use BOOKS in the Classroom Devised for Computer Learning?"   I'm being facetious but that's the point.  A book is a technology too.   How and when we use any technology and for what purpose are the questions we all need to ask.

Do you see the difference?   "Computer learning" doesn't exist.   In 2011, it exists less than it did a decade ago and, in a few years, that phrase won't exist at all.   Students learn.  Computers are tools for all kinds of things, from checking the Facebook page, to making notetaking easier, to being fact checking or calculating devices that can take a class to a more sophisticated level to interactive social networking devices that can either distract a class or allow for new forms of group collaboration.   There are many other uses as well.   The point is that most profs have (a) simply "adapted" (as a colleague told me recently) to computers without understanding the intellectual and pedagogical changes they can enable; or (b) resigned themselves to their present, gleefully or resentflly; or (c) made them into a pedagogical tool; or (d) all of the above.    

Muchas están empezando a explorar el potencial tan grande que ofrece la tecnología para educar y aprender.