I was joking around on Twitter with Michael Berman, about vendor tweets appearing in a conference stream. You can see the thread, but the point is, he called me a chatbot.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/twitter.com\/amichaelberman\/status\/1056944712756514816<\/p>\n
And that sounded a bit like a challenge.<\/p>\n
Specifically, it sounded like a challenge to find something that spit out the buzzwords of educational technology, like I was doing with Michael. And then the Imp of the Perverse<\/a> whispered in my ear that maybe what I should do is mashup famous quotes with those buzzwords.<\/p>\n And so @EdtechEpigrams<\/a> was conceived.<\/p>\n I have a memory that Networked Narratives<\/a>\u00a0includes a “make a Twitter bot” activity, so thanks to Alan Levine and Mia Zamora for leaving me that breadcrumb. It took a couple of swings at Google to find something I could quickly make use of, but Katherine Marzinsky’s post<\/a>\u00a0about her @nounjective<\/a> bot fit the bill.<\/p>\n That got me the pointer to Zach Whalen’s SSBot<\/a>, which is basically a tool for generating random tweets based on a Google Spreadsheet and a provided script. I worked helpdesk long enough to know that I should be skeptical about running code I can’t read… but I went ahead and ran it anyway. It’s a pretty slick tool and configuring it wasn’t too hard. (Except for the part where I got columns and rows confused and generated a whole bunch of gibberish… but I fixed that by just cut-and-pasting the data into the right tab on the spreadsheet.)<\/p>\n Honestly, the complicated part is playing with syntax and grammar.\u00a0My bot is following a very standard formula of<\/p>\n (witty saying) (ending with a buzzword).<\/p>\n but I was kind of surprised to see what a restraint that is. For starters, it means I have to stick to quotes ending in nouns (or noun forms). It also means that definitions are mostly out, since those would be funniest as<\/p>\n (buzzword) (followed by a witty saying).<\/p>\n Which is kind of a pity, because\u00a0Bryan Alexander’s Devil’s Dictionary<\/a> was another inspiration for this project.<\/p>\n