Thursday 12th May – Kate Haag, Siân Bayne and Stewart Lamb Cromar met with a group of University staff and students who had expressed an interest in finding out more about this pilot project. We gave a short demonstration the Pandorabots system, as it currently stands, and discussed different aspects of how best to take this potential University service forward.

There was attendance from a wide-range of University schools and departments:

• Accommodation Services
• Digital Education Unit, Dick Vet
• EUSA
• Information Services (User Support, LTW)
• School of Biological Sciences
• School of Social and Political Science

People have already identified several different potential applications for a Twitter bot ranging from integration within a MOOC, to fielding student enquiries.

Some limitations with the system demonstrated were identified and we aim to rectify these over the coming weeks. In particular the ability for the bot to also respond to hashtags and trends. At the minute it only engages with tweets containing the @ symbol (e.g. @teacherbot_test).

One very positive outcome of this meeting was the creation of a new Teacherbot community mailing list. If you are also interested in joining please subscribe using the following instructions (University of Edinburgh only):

Send an email to sympa@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk with nothing in the subject line and in the message body put the following:

SUBSCRIBE teacherbot-community NAME

Where NAME is your first name and surname.

Further instructions regarding mailing lists are available here:
http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/computing/comms-and-collab/email/lists/sympa/

Teacherbot Community / Teacherbot by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0