Gareth Jones

Last night I took part in my first ever twitter discussion. There were a couple of strange people who seemed to have missed the point of a discussion by simply posting proverbs (what was the point, guys?) but on the whole there were lots of interesting points made and questions asked.

One thing I found quite frustrating however was the 140 character limit. I mean, for status updates I suppose that’s fine, but for discussion? That’s less than a single text message, and yet within that you also have to include the topic that you’re posting to and if you’re replying to someone specifically then you even have to include their name with an @ symbol before it. Already that takes you down to around 120 characters to convey your point no matter how complicated or intricate it is.

At first you keep forgetting about the limit. You compose a message that you already feel is much shorter than anything else you’ve written that day, only to glance at the screen to find that you’re actually 15 characters over the limit and unable to post. You then read through your message, replacing longer words for shorter equivalents (which never have exactly the same meaning) and substituting shorter words for txt spk. If you’re lucky you get below 140 characters, but if you’re not then you have to start the whole process again. Finally, when your message is hardly legible and barely makes the point that you initially set out to make, it’s short enough to post.

Twitter started out in 2006 as a status update website. I remember checking it out at my old workplace – the tagline was “what are you doing?”. I registered, posted a short message, then dismissed it as pointless and moved on. A couple of years passed, some celebrities stumbled across it and all of a sudden it was the place to go to talk to people you’d never met.

Fast forward to today and millions of people are posting on twitter on a daily basis. Twitter is finding itself included on more and more services – most recently Xbox Live and PlayStation Network – yet many people (myself included) are still wondering what all the fuss is about. Twitter is like Facebook but without the good bits; in fact, it’s not like Facebook at all – it’s just the Facebook status update feature by itself. As far as I can tell, people haven’t tried to hold a discussion through Facebook status updates, so why are they doing it with twitter?

Twitter has exploded for the same reason that Nintendo’s Wii is dominating the other, technologically superior consoles: ease of use and the casual market. In the same way that certain gamers who are reluctant to pick up a controller to play Halo or Call of Duty are happy to pick up a Wiimote to play party games, certain content authors are much happier using twitter than a technically superior alternative that they perceive as more complicated. To a lot of these people, the 140 character limit and the omnipresent Fail Whale are necessary evils because the alternatives are all just too difficult or time-consuming to get into. Of course, anyone who has taken the time or made the effort to set up one of the alternatives – personally I’m thinking about an IRC server here – knows that the extra time invested in setting everything up and learning how to use it is more than a worthwhile investment with with the extra features and flexibility that are available. IRC is actually designed for discussion and file-sharing rather than just posting about what you’re currently watching on TV or how sunny it is outside.

A lot of twitter users who use it for discussion are now becoming frustrated by its limitations – as I was after just a few minutes. Twitter never claimed that their service should be used for lengthy discussion though (although they are trying to bolt-on extra functionality now to try to satisfy demand), so to complain about its shortcomings as a discussion medium does seem a little unfair in all honesty. After all, you wouldn’t kick a cat for not being able to bark as it never claimed to be able to in the first place. So, what can be done to help people find a more suitable means of discussing hot topics without having to do anything too difficult or time-consuming?

Since I work in the educational sector, I’ve decided to set up some chat rooms dedicated to the educational discussions that currently take place on twitter. They’re free, quick and easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, allow proper discussion and file-sharing and also provide transcripts of the discussion for archive purposes. So far, #sschat, #mathchat and #gtchat all have a dedicated room with the possibility of more coming on board in the near future. The rooms are at http://discussions.learnalot.co.uk and will be used (in conjunction with the usual twitter discussion) from this coming Monday. More information is available on the Learnalot blog.

Tonight we’ve unveiled the Learnalot portal and opened the discussion forum for registrations.

The portal isn’t yet taking subscribers as there’s still some work to do on the resources themselves, but with the portal now completed it made sense to unveil it for three important reasons:

1. It gives people who are interested in what we’re doing (and Google Analytics shows there’s a fair few of you out there!) an opportunity to take a look and to get excited about what’s coming.
2. It allows people to register for the newsletter and be kept up to date with resource progress and more importantly, the portal’s launch.
3. Finally, it allows the search engines to start indexing the site so that when we do launch, potential users will be able to find us.

Registrations on the forums are welcome to all those who are interested in the portal or who wish to ask questions or provide feedback. Naturally, the portal will also serve as a support forum when we launch.

We’ve put together a behind the scenes blog for Learnalot at http://blog.learnalot.co.uk, on which we’ll be posting related news, announcements and resource previews on a pretty regular basis.

The blog has only just been set up, but we’ll be adding content to it regularly so should have some interesting content on there soon.

We’ve also set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account to make it easier for people to discuss the portal, its resources and to contribute their ideas both while the service is in development and when it goes live.

I have recently secured significant venture capital funding for Learnalot and as a result have submitted my resignation at Oliver Wyman. I’ve requested the soonest possible leaving date and as such my last day is provisionally (assuming the handover is completed by then, which I’m sure it will be) this Thursday!

This leaves me free to work on Learnalot full-time, which will obviously mean a vastly accelerated development schedule. All members of the team are understandably very excited about this development and are ready to go – this is a very exciting time!

As a result of all this, Learnalot updates will be more frequent as there will obviously be a lot more to update about!

Today’s learners are bombarded with all kinds of high quality digital entertainment; including big-screen movies at the cinema, high-definition video games on their plasmas at home and big-budget mobile video games when they’re on the move. As the quality and the availability of this entertainment increases, learners are expecting other forms of media to keep up and are looking for higher quality resources from which to learn; resources that can satisfy their appetite for impressive audio-visuals while still retaining relevant content.

Most elearning aimed at maths students is dry, static, stale and boring. Other resources succeed in being a little more creative with their ideas, but sadly fall short when it comes to their execution. This is sometimes because they have been developed by maths teachers who know how to do maths, but don’t know how to create engaging software with high production values despite their best efforts and intentions.

Learnalot is an exciting educational portal that fuses the subject knowledge of teachers with top-end software to create case study problems that truly engage and challenge its learners. Each case study is different but they all provide pupils, teachers and parents with problems that are fun to use whilst also being a rich learning experience.

Although we are currently focussed on developing a full suite of Mathematics resources for KS3, we eventually plan to cater for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 as well as GCSE across a number of other subjects and will be making frequent additions to the list of available resources.

Our case studies will be available to educational institutions on an annual subscription basis.

The portal itself is currently in development, as is our first resource, and we aim to have between five and ten resources ready for the launch of the portal early next year.