I've always (at least since my then-soon-to-be wife bought me the desk plaque above announcing it) known that I was a geek. However, it took me 'til the FETC conference last week to learn that I was a twit too.
I was hesitant at first, as I'm sure we all were/are. I have no interested at all in knowing what Shakira had for dinner last night, nor do I ever intend to announce that "LOL I'm hvng dnr wit frnds @ 5guyz" or anything like that. I will, however, tweet the occasional pearl of academic wisdom (at least from my perspective) or little tidbit of social commentary.
I must admit, in checking out who was following me, I was happy to see several of my peers, both from work and out there in the twitverse, display an interest in what I had to say. I was also excited to see that @sexxyrussianblond had sought me out for my wisdom. Even after I lost the "Free Internetz Lottery". (And they were so positive in the email that I had won. All I had to do was send my credit card info and they'd be sure to send along the money.) Oh.. wait. Yes! You have to manage your followers. Occasionally block some, I'm sure goodhearted, individual who might have slightly different goals from your own.
The roundabout point of this meandering post is that Twitter can, and should, become an important part of your professional learning. And as an educator, there's absolutely no better place to start than:
Go ahead. Check it out. I'll wait. ............
Oh... Hey! You're back. Slick huh? When you have time, check out the rest of his site. There are absolutely tons of useful sites, links, archives and more there.
Do you understand about hashtags? Here's the deal. If you're tweeting something of interest to the, say, educational community, you might end your post with #edchat. There are loads of like minded folks who use twitter tools to search for that hashtag (#edchat) and have a separate column in their tweetdeck (more later) just for posts with that tag. In addition, at Cybraryman's site you can find out this:
Noon and 7 pm EST
What does that mean? It means that on Tuesdays ad 12 and 7 EST, that hashtag is bustling with conversation. I'll admit it's a little hard to follow, but it's archived. Where? HERE, of course! Each scheduled chat has a topic and you can decide if you want to partake if you want.
OK. Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a free tool that allows you to segment out your Twitter feeds into a manageable format. You can have a single column for all feeds, another for #edchat, another for @shakira or however your little twetin' heart desires. It's incredibly helpful. It's not the only app, but it's a good one. Chrome users can install it as an app, so it will show right up on your apps window. The great thing about it is that if you have #edchat in a separate column, the chat will not get interrupted by @shakira letting you know that her broccoli was undercooked. Very cool.
So there you have it. This twit's views on tweets. On a blog.
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