Sarah Milstein, author of the O’Reilly Radar report Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution, pointed me to this blog post with a lot of interesting suggestions about how to use Twitter as a teaching tool. It’s good reading, and the Academic Hack blog (which I hadn’t heard of) looks like a good new addition to my RSS reader.
Tag: Twitter
-
Open Forum Brain Dump
I’m sitting in my hotel room near LAX early in the morning and I have a little time between the legs of my trip to reflect on the amazing experience I just had at The OPEN Forum. I must say, Thanos Partners did a superb job of organizing a fun, fascinating, and frictionless conference. (And the food. OMG.) I expect to write a number of posts reflecting on different facets that were covered during the forum, but this first one will mainly be a brain dump to capture a bunch of raw observations before they have a chance to fly out of my head.
-
Learning to Like Twitter
In the recent past, I wrote about not really getting Twitter. Since then, I have to say that it has grown on me. I am not and never will be an addict. But it does add a nice social dimension to my day, particularly given that I work alone from my home office a lot of the time. It lets me feel a little more connected with friends and colleagues, and does so without taking up unacceptable amounts of time. So, for my former fellow Twitter skeptics, I have a few suggestions for how to get the most out of it:
-
I, Too, Am a Twit
For a long time, I vowed never to get sucked into Twitter. The idea of broadcasting my every belch and hiccup to the world in real time just struck me as absurdly narcissistic. Of course, I made exactly the same vow about blogging for largely the same reason back in the day and, well, here we are.
And thus it was that I observed myself with detached amusement as Nate Angell (a.k.a. @xolotl…his gang name, I guess) succeeded in convincing me to give it a try when we sat down to lunch (along with Mike Zackrison) at JA-SIG last month. Nate, in addition to being super-sharp about ed tech issues in general, is also one of the best conceptual salesmen I’ve ever met. Seriously. By the time he was done working me over, I was like, “@Dude, WTF was I thinking? I have to download Twhirl and start tweeting, like, RIGHT NOW!!”
So I did. I gave Twhirl a whirl. Hated it. Then I tried hooking Twitter into GChat. That made me happy for a few hours until I remembered how much I hate GChat. (And don’t get me started on the state of chat clients in the Windows world.) Then I found TwitterFox, which I like and seems to work well. (I’m a Firefox extension addict anyway.) Since then I’ve been tweeting (hate that word) on and off. And now, after diving in and spending some time with Twitter, I can honestly say that…
…uh…
…I still don’t get it.