TwHistory

Goals for 2010

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:29:53 +0000

We’ve gotten several requests from people asking how they can start their own TwHistory reenactment. While all the technology exists to run your own project, it can be a bit unwieldy. It involves using tools from several different sites, and there is no easy way to manage it. And once the reenactment is over, there is no way to set it up so that it can be broadcast again the following year.

We’re trying to create a set of web tools that will make starting, managing, and running your own reenactment much easier. In fact we’re applying to several funding agencies in hopes of getting some money to create tools that would allow users to:

Easily start and manage a TwHistory project
Create a list characters
Schedule or import tweets that would then be broadcast at a certain day or time
Broadcast the reenactment every year

If you are interested in starting your own TwHistory project, there is a way that you can help. The funding agencies to which we are applying want to see projects that many people will benefit from. If you think that your organization would use tools like the ones I’ve described above, please send us a message. If we can show that many oragnizations are interested in these kinds of tools, we will have a better chance of getting funded.

Thanks!

TwHistory in The Chronicle of Higher Education

tomcaswell — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:10:00 +0000

The Wired Campus Blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education posted an article about the TwHistory project called What Lincoln Would Have Tweeted. We are grateful for all the attention the project is getting, and we look forward to new collaborations and reenactments in the coming year.

TwHistory Presentation Link

tomcaswell — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:35:49 +0000

We are here in Barcelona, about to present TwHistory at the 6th Seminar of the UNESCO Chair in E-Learning. We’re really enjoying the beautiful weather and the excellent presentations on Open Social Learning. Here is the link to our slides: http://prezi.com/u844gbe1oi34/.

Part of our participation in the conference included helping to organize the conference Twitter channel. If you would like to follow along or add your own comments, the tag is #eLChair09. We’ve been collecting all the tweets with the conference hashtag here. You can also follow us on Twitter: @twhistory. Thanks!

UNESCO Seminar

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:48:55 +0000

Tom Caswell and I have been invited to speak at the International Seminar of UNESCO Chair in E-Learning. The seminar is in Barcelona, and the focus of the seminar this year will be Open Social Leaning. You can read our proposal over at Tom’s blog.

We will of course be twittering the event, so follow us at @marionjensen and @tom4cam.

Newt Joins in on the Fun

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:11:49 +0000

It looks like Newt Gingrich has decided to do his very own Twitter reenactment of the Battle of Trenton. He is calling it a ‘Twitterenactment’. We are certainly fans of using Twitter to reenact historical events, but his claim at being first is a off a bit…by about 6 months.

If you’d like to follow along, you can read more about the event here, or follow General George Washington (@genwashington76), Jonathan Van Dorn, a private in the colonial army (@pvtvandornNJ), and Hessian commander Colonel Johann Rall (@colonelrall).

It should be noted that while they are going to recreate the battle in real time, the Battle of Trenton took place on December 26th, and not October, so the exact days do not match up.

Cuban Missile Crisis

admin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:48:31 +0000

@CRFederman is a history teacher, and a basketball coach, in St. Louis Missouri. She is also awesome.

@CRFederman followed our Battle of Gettysburg this summer, and decided she liked the idea. She organized her high school students and they are about to tweet the Cuban Missile Crisis. They are just getting started so if you want to follow along there are several ways you can do it. If you already have a twitter account, then we highly recommend you going to this page. Simply follow everybody on the list, sit back, and enjoy a recreation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you don’t have a twitter account, then you can follow the whole crew on this page.

The folks here at TwHistory are excited to see the events of 1962 unfold!

Welcome

admin — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:38:49 +0000

Welcome to TwHistory. We believe that history is filled with exciting stories. We also believe that these stories can be told through Twitter; through the people who lived and experienced them. We go through journals, diaries, letters, and other original sources to deliver the day-to-day lives of people who lived through some of histories most exciting times. We broadcast this information through Twitter, and feel this is a new and exciting approach to understanding history. Instead of reading about a month-long campaign in a few hours, you experience it over the course of a month in small 140 character ‘Tweets’.

Gettysburg

The battle is over! Thank you for following the battle of Gettysburg. It has been an amazing two months. We hope to run the battle next year at the same time. If you are interested in following out other historical tweets (Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK Assassination, and more), be sure to follow @twhistory on twitter, and if you want to help out with future projects, please drop by our volunteer page, or join the discussion in our forum.