Category Archives: miscellaneous

Who cares about grades?*

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@timbuckteeth (aka Steve Wheeler) tweeted his Twitter grade today (and beat me to a blog post that I got to know about via Twitter while writing this one here). It was at 67. In his blog post, Steve brings up examples of edubloggers that score much higher or are not found at all for no explainable reason. Thus, I can happily refer to his work without coming up with my own list. :-)

However, while I was unaware of Steve’s post, I had already run the Twitter Grader on my account (yeah, I know, now it’s not only ego Googling but also ego grading ;-) ), and came up with a 47. That means that I “score higher than 47 percent of the other user profiles that have been graded.” Randomly running another account through the mill, I chose @gsiemens and he got a “0″. Wow. Surely, that must have been a mistake. After re-grading him because he can’t have such a low grade (and because I messed up my first 2 screencasts), he finally had a grade of 97.7. That is more like my perception of his Twitter activity. ;-)

Now I was curious as to the methods used for the grading. The website only gives the following general information:

The Twitter Grade measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score. [...]

Your grade is calculated using a combination of factors including:

* The number of followers you have
* The power of this network of followers
* The pace of your updates
* The completeness of your profile
* …a few others.

The “a few others” are the bolts that make this interesting. What are these? How do they figure in? What were the selection criteria for the 36,133 ranks? What do these ranks represent? There are 3,134,420 accounts according to TwitDir (stats from today) that only lists public accounts. So how does it work? Or is it just a nice gadget that you try once, look at your rank, be (not so) happy and then never think back to it?

The grader does not return a pretty visualization to look at, but the final grade is already powerful in itself if you take it seriously and try to figure out what your grade actually means for your Twitter network.

I don’t really trust the calculations (which you should never do anyway unless you manipulated them yourself) because the ranking does not stop at 100. @Scobleizer, a high-flyer in terms of followers (34,968), following (20,991) and updates (14,402) got a rank of 100.3! Explain that to me please. ;-)

Scobleizers twitter grade

Scobleizer's twitter grade

On a lighter note and aside from statistics etc.: While you are waiting for the computing teacher to come up with your grade, you are treated to some human phrases instead of the usual “Loading…”.

The human in Twitter Grader (Flash required)

* … when it comes to Twitter?

Elluminate me

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A crowd of approx. 82 participants of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, commonly known as CCK08, just met in a synchronous online session in Elluminate. It was quite an experience for me as that was my first live session in Elluminate. Previously, I was only able to watch recorded sessions of webinars.

Participating in this hour long discussion was challenging as I had to listen to the various speakers and watch the rapidly flowing chat. This time, the whiteboard could still be mostly looked at peripherally. Had the session been at the previously set time (2 a.m. in the morning for me), I would not have been able to follow for most of the time, I guess, as I am not a night owl. ;-)

I think I would have coped a little bit better even now if the chat window had been bigger. This little window was way too small for me to see the comments properly. I’m not talking about the size of the font, but rather the comments themselves. At times they just sped past and were gone beyond the scrollbar. Maybe I can increase the window size. I haven’t figured that one out yet. However, I still have 11 more weeks to go to either find a way to enlarge the text chat area or to get used to reading the comments in the small window without losing track of the speaker. :-)

This shows that I am not so good at multi-tasking. George Siemens, who moderated the session by himself for a few minutes before Stephen Downes joined, and was already there before the session, did a wonderful job of talking and reading the comments at the same time and getting back to them.

Screenshot of an (empty) Elluminate session. The text chat box is way too small for my liking as a lot of stuff happens in there.

Screenshot of an (empty) Elluminate session. The text chat box is way too small for my liking as a lot of stuff happens in there.

My surname around the world, well, at least part of it…

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Occasionally, I have wondered where people live who have the same name or who might even be related to my family. My mom’s side of the family does have a pretty complete family tree going back a few centuries. From this side we know that there are relatives living in the USA whom we also know. But the information on the other side of my family is rather spotty.

Today, @Digitalstudio sent a link to the website “World Names Profiler“. This was a great opportunity to check out where I may find people who share the same surname.

So, here is the result:

People with my surname can be found in some parts of the world

People with my surname can be found in some parts of the world

The name pops up most in Canada with a frequency per million (FPM) of 36.9. That is followed by Luxembourg with 8.5, the U.S.A. with 7.03, and Germany comes in 4th with 3.56. The number seems to be right for Luxembourg, as we are just shy of half a million people in this country and I only found two fellow “Hoeppner”‘s in the online telephone book. Of course, some, like me, may not be listed. However, if we divide 8.5 by 2 minus a little bit because we are not quite half a million, that gets you close to the 3. There may even be more as these people may be married

Checking the FAQ gave me a better picture of how many names the database actually includes:

How many names do you have information for?
We hold data for approximately 300 million people in 26 countries of the world, representing a total population of 1 billion people in those countries. In our database there are 8 million unique surnames and 5 million unique forenames.
What countries do you have data for?
We have data for 26 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Oceania.

OK. But already the top four countries for my name have more than 300 million inhabitants. According to the CIA World Factbook, they have close to 421 million people. So even though 300 million may look like a big number, it is not in closer examination also taking in account that there are an estimated 6.721 billion people on earth.

Even though these numbers do not really represent “the world” because 26 is a far cry from the 192 recognized by the United Nations, it is still interesting to see where I might bump into another person with my last name – related or not. Canada seems to be the hot spot, especially Manitoba. When looking at the top cities, I’d have to go to Gurnee in Illinois or second to Encinitas in California. That’s not really in Canada, but somewhere warm is also nice. :-)

Extending the scope of this blog

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I have started this blog back in 2006 (using a different blog software) to end my email “curiousity letter” as I kept adding friends to it who were then not able to read previous mails. Though not many of my friends were and are avid blog readers, I hope they do stop by now and then to see what I’ve come across.

Then in March of this year, I decided to open my blog to the public, not because I thought I could revolutionize the blogosphere or become the next big thing, but to make it easier for people I know to read my postings without going through the hassle of signing up for a user account and keeping track of another login and password.

Due to my quickly upcoming participation in the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, I had to think about creating another blog to be able to post my thoughts and reflections on the course. However, on second thought I wondered why I shouldn’t use this blog here as I will continue to be curious and wonder about stuff. Only the scope of my musings will be extended. Up until now I did not write about anything related to my learning experiences etc., but only about other things. I can use this opportunity to jump into the cold water and also write about things here that concern me professionally.

Let’s see how it goes.

My virtual past

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A number of friends always ask for pictures in which I am as we don’t see each other a whole lot. If you know me, you know that I am a behind-the-camera person and that there are hardly any pictures of me on the memory cards in my cameras.

However, I can come up with fake pictures thanks to Yearbook Yourself, even for years when I have not been around or when I would have been too young for such yearbook pictures (five of them).

It’s been fun to discover the site and upload a picture (but I did not save the result at first). I then bookmarked the page and sent the link to Bob who yearbooked himself. He uploaded pics on Facebook where two others also tried the yearbook picture generator. It was only then that I returned to the generator and saved a few of the yearbook pictures and put them together. You never know when they might come in handy.

I guess, if I were a brilliant writer and had the time, I could come up with biographies for these six faces displayed below to create their virtual stories. But as I am not that person, I just show the pictures and let you come up with stories yourself or maybe you just want to follow the link to the generator and upload a picture of yourself.

My face yearbook pictures

My fake yearbook pictures