7 posts tagged “twitter”
I know it's old news that Pownce is closing, but I just went across there to pick up my posts as an export for vox and when I got to the point of importing I noticed that all my posts were being fed there from Twitter anyway. Talk about redundant. Long ago I must have begun feeding Twitter to Pownce, and completely forgotten about it.
One less blog/microblog/social networking service to worry about. I wonder if I can take the knife to any more? Jaiku?
Alright, so there are many reasons to be cheerful, but lets start with three. Not the only ones, nor the most important ones, but 3 being the magic number, a good place to start.
Almost a year ago Mick and Min and Nettie bought me a moleskine when they came to Japan. I've been writing in it almost every other day and I'm starting to feel as though it's had a transformational effect not only on writing about things I experience but on observing them as they happen.
Until today I haven't really been that interested in going back through it and reading it again, but I was prompted by a freinds retrospectiveness to delve into the waybackmachine and visit one of my first blogs. Most of the links are broken and the jpegs are missing due to the archive not following links contained within javascript, but it's still there, frozen in time.
Moments we capture in print or on screen are also indelibly imprinted on our psyche. I am who I today for as much I have determined for myself, shaped by the influence of others.
Today I am tired and sore. Yesterday was a 16 hour working day, and tomorrow will be another fourteen. I am happy for the standard 8 today, but feel so driven to produce something of value I am up writing now.
How different things are now to what they were a year ago. I was newly out of work and expecting my third child. It was getting very cold and I was sporting a long beard. I was in a foreign country surounded by people speaking a foreign language and those that did speak English were paying for me to do so.
Things couldn't be more different. I am clean shaven and working three jobs to get back on track. My third child is almost walking, and all three of my kids are at least in the same city. I still get paid to speak English, but this time it's different because it's my second job and the pressure is off. Now I'm able to poor my talents and skills in to my day job I'm a lot more settled.
I still have a long way to go before I can say I'm doing exactly what I want to do, but I am getting there. I'm in a place where I can share my vision and make a difference. I could be getting paid more, but that's beside the point, I'm learning and growing into my responsibilities and that feels good.
Where I'm going from here is the nexus of technology and learning. I have a couple of plans that are slowly being brought to fruition. I won't be revealing all just yet, but you can see things slowly taking shape in places like rainbowhill88 and jrfiction on YouTube, and rainbowhill and jrfiction on tumblr. If you're a higher frequency person, then join me on twitter in either Japanese or English flavours.
There's also edufire, which is where I'm off to now, to try and build up my student base. I'm tutoring in Japanese and English over there. If you're a teacher maybe you should come and join us, if you're a student maybe you should come and learn from me!
When I started twittering in Japanese about a year ago, I had no idea how far I would go with it, or what benefit it would bring to my study of Japanese. At times it has been a distraction, and at the height of my addiction attraction to it, kind of costly, as my international SMS bill went through the roof.
What it has helped me do is be more productive, more outwardly expressive with my inner Japanese speaker. In some respects it has helped me find my my Japanese voice, as clumsy and stilted as it still feels. Sometimes there is a dialogue maintained with other twitterers, and sometimes there is not. There is always the need to formulate thoughts into comprehensible sentences.
Just recently I have been gathering my daily twittering into the one post with the help of a service called LoudTwitter. I was hoping that it would spur me on to breaking out of the 140 character limit, and into writing more consistently in Japanese on this blog. So far only 5days of this kind of daily diary through twitter have been posted here.
Never would I have in wildest dreams thought any one would go to the bother of translating my twits into English. But , someone has. Now I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, the illusion of anonymity and privacy provided by blogging in my second language has just been erased a little further.
Blogging in my second language I feel I am far less critical of my self, perhaps blunter and less self conscious about it. In English the same expressions may come across as selfish, and ill-conceived. As a Japanese speaker I am not yet beyond the junior high school vernacular, but that's OK with me.
There are plenty of people blogging in a language that is not their first. Does it provide you with a different sense of self? Do you feel safer presenting parts of you that you wouldn't in your mother tongue? If you could blog in another language, what would you say? Would it be different from what you already write about?
It's almost 2am in the morning, discovering some great tracks on last.FM from artists I thought I'd lost interest in has fuelled yet another comment and blogging session. I'm not sure when it will end. I don't think I'm in denial, but I want to be sure so I do a quick search and check out the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) and find that I am an average user.
Hang on a second, none of these questions seem to fit my pattern of usage, and anyway isn't surfing the web so 2001? I no longer spend as much time sitting in front of the computer as I used to, but I am more connected to a circle of people I call friends/followers/contacts/neighbours/subscribers than I have ever been. It starts just after I wake up and finishes just before I go to bed.
"You are an average on-line user.
You may surf the Web a bit too
long at times, but you have
control over your usage."
I am constantly adjusting what I like to call my signal to noise ratio, fine tuning feeds, connecting in new ways to the same people, connecting to new people in familiar ways. I have a routine that works for me. Still, I am not yet satisfied.
It has been said that I am not txting as much, but I have found ways to hide the constant stream of SMS flowing into my inbox. There is no vibration on my phone, no ring tone, and not even a notification light for txt. I check my phone in regular intervals, but not excessively, because I now there will be something there for me when I do.
I have simplified my computing, if you want to call it that by freeing myself from the desktop, there are nodes for mobile computing everywhere, and my terminal (a DSlite with Opera Mini) is smaller than a pulp fiction paperback.
Season bloggers are limiting posts in length and number, some are saying goodbye, there may be a backlash against microblogging but it is small and quiet. Even the the masterminds behind the monster have failed to stop it from encroaching upon their lives.
It's now half past two in Japan, and the twitter stream is slowing down here, but just picking up on the other side of the Pacific. I'm in no mood to chase the sun, but I will be there when it rises.
It seems that the genie is out of the bottle and will take some shoving to get it back in.
twitter:jrfiction
jaiku:jrfiction
tumblr:jrfiction
tumblr:rainbowhill
pownce:jrfiction
btw. if you have a burning need want pownce invites I have what you're looking for.
It's kind of rare that I get the time these days to sit down and write a full blooded blog post, and when I do I'm usually posting pictures of our latest trip to the park for friends and family. That's not something that I think is terribly interesting for most people. Most often I've been connecting with people online via my mobile phone and Nintendo DS with Opera mini.
I read some where recently that people love reading short blog posts with lists of links so I've decided to send you a five of my favourite blogging tools on the web. This is where you will find me spending most of my down time, while I'm on my way to work and in my breaks.
- Tumblr - A tumblelog, fast and light, very visual and a bit like scrap-booking.
http://rainbowhill.tumblr.com/ and in Japanese http://jrfiction.tumblr.com/ - Twitter - microblogging tool for those with an attention deficit, also a very good way to share news, and keep your ear to the ground. I'm posting here only in Japanese.
http://twitter.com/jrfiction - Jaiku - The choice for me between Jaiku and Twitter is simple, the former is in English and the latter is in Japanese. I must admit that I have connected with more people on Twitter, perhaps because I put more effort in.
http://jrfiction.jaiku.com/ - Flickr - I've only just rediscovered Flickr, they have some new upload tools and it's simple to upload via email also. I repurpose my feed here for Tumblr and Jaiku. My photosets are also available through other sites like vox and facebook.
http://www.flickr.com/people/rainbowhill/
I was going to mention 43things and Facebook because they seem to absorb a lot of my time, but that's only when I am in front of the PC, which is like I said earlier a lot rarer these days.
I probably don't post here as much as I'd like to, and it's been nagging at me for months. It's not for want of anything to say, or lack of interesting content for that matter. I could do worse things than write a boring blog entry. I don't sit here in front of the compose screen for minutes on end unable to fill the white space, but I often write things and never publish them publicly. There they sit in eternal draft mode, gathering virtual dust as their relevancy sinks further and further into the great bowels of the web, beyond the reach of any search engine spider.
Believe it or not, there are even posts composed and ready to go sitting on my phone at this moment that you may never get to see, because they are not polished enough. What an irony, how can anything be polished enough if done by thumb alone? Perhaps I need to lower my standards a little bit further and let some raw edges in.
It's not as if I haven't been an active blogger, I Twitter, I Jaiku, I keep a list, I do a reasonable job of maintaining my social networks here and elsewhere. I just don't write much of substance. There it growls again, that unhappy mutt called self criticism.
I'm sure programming will return to normal soon...
In the meantime and on a lighter note, I'm on holiday for 6days. I've got some things to do in the morning with the family, and a trip to a zoo in Kyoto on Friday to look forward to. The next few days after that are free, and I plan to relax and get into a new routine with regards to fitness and blogging. Two of the things I most enjoy these days. There is also a heavy duty Japanese test looming that I have to get to work on.
I am always grateful for the people who take the time to read my posts, and even happier when they comment. Thank you. It also reminds me that I have a responsibility to reciprocate in kind. I'm now rushing off to say thank you to my one hundredth subscriber on YouTube before anyone leaves.
I am writing this in response to Bart's post on learning languages, Polish and English. When writing my comment on the original post it soon became apparent there was a lot more I wanted to say on languages.
Thanks for the post, Bart. I agree with you in saying that the Internet is cheaper than almost any other method of learning a language. Except, perhaps, if you happen to live and work in a language community that is not your own. If you happen to have both, like me, then you are very lucky indeed.
I am also with Steve in saying that sources of good content are needed, but not necessarily more websites. You can find content in your desired language almost any where you look, in the street, in the library, on TV and of course on the Internet. Perhaps what we need as language learners, is to learn how to get this content working for us.
What do I mean "working for us"? Well, please let me explain. If we decide one day that we want to learn a language, we have a much better chance of doing that if our goal is to understand what people are saying in that language, moreover, to communicate with them in their native tongue. Language is about communication after all.
Now, communication happens between people, and those people share a common bond called community. Moving in with my wife's family in Japan has made me part of their family and the wider community. Most of us don't have the luxury of being able to move to another country, yet we all need community to achieve our language goals.
The people I teach English to do this by joining an expensive conversation school, where we simulate to a large degree natural conversation. In a sense I feel this interaction is artificial. After all, they are paying for a service and they have certain expectations, there are not the same bonds that normally hold communities together. I don't spend any money on language learning apart from the occasional text book or dictionary, I certainly don't pay for conversation. I don't think any should have to pay to find someone to talk to.
What the Internet has made possible for me, is to allow me access to wider communities of Japanese speakers. Within those communities I am exposed to a greater variety of communications styles, and hence vocabularies and expressions, than I would find at home. I naturally gravitate to communities where there is a large degree of activity, which exposes me to a greater number of opportunities to find people to talk to and things to talk about.
There are many tools that have become available recently that enable us to join communities and manage our involvement in them. Social networking has become the new media buzzword, everyone has facebook or myspace account, people are getting connected on a wider scale than ever before. What I am really interested in is how we can use these new tools and technologies to enhance our experience of this world as individuals, and secondly, as language learners how we can adapt them to suit our own language learning needs.
To see examples of where I am active in virtual communities of people who speaking or wanting to speak Japanese, look no further than this list (warning: shameless self promotion) .
- My YouTube Profile - Here I post a vlog in Japanese, my subscribers are mostly Japanese and non-Japanese who speak Japanese. Every time someone comments on my vlog I get constructive feedback on my Japanese, and in Japanese. Just recently we started a smaller community of non-Japanese who speak Japanese on YouTube groups for more support and encouragement.
- My Twitter Profile - I'm just new at this one, but it forces me to be attentive to my language production and comprehension skills during the day. I work in an English speaking environment, so I need to direct my attention towards communicating in Japanese more regularly than in the mornings and evenings at home.
- My 43 Things - Mostly posts in English but my involvement in things such as the goal Learn Japanese gives me access to other learners which can help me find good sources of content.
- My Vox Groups - Vox is of course both a social networking tool and a blogging site, having all of these rich media services also helps when pulling together a community. I still have a lot more connections that I want to build here, and Japanese speaking friends I want to make. It is also very handy to be able to put all your productive output in one place.
Well this post is starting to drag on just a bit, but I thought you might these things interesting. I'd like to know if and how everyone here is using social networking tools to improve their language ability. I'd love to share some more ideas with you all.
Brett F.
