Blog #8:Twitter

Introduction

Twitter has been the first web 2.0 tool to make me feel like a crotchety old naysayer. Until I watched this clip from Dave Letterman with guest star Kevin Spacey . . .



. . . now that's what a crotchety Twitter naysayer looks like. I feel a little better about myself ;o) Although I haven't found an immediate use for Twitter in my personal life or teaching practise, I have explored the potential of the tool and learned about it enough to understand some of the possible implications for teaching, learning, networking, and marketing.

Reflections on the process of learning about Twitter

I signed up for Twitter at the beginning of the semester as it seemed like one of those tools that would organically grow and evolve over time, similar to my facebook page. Although I was completely unfamiliar with Twitter, I had been hearing about it a lot in the media. My friends and family didn't seem to be using Twitter, but maybe students were? With all the hype, it seemed like a web 2.0 tool that was expanding, worth investigating, and here to stay (well, at least for another year or two).

Account set up was easy, as was sending my first few tweets. Because I started using Twitter before learning about Delicious, I started out by using my Twitter account as a self-serving bookmark dumping ground. This habit was aided by the fact that long URLs were automatically translated into shorter ones by the bit.ly service and some of my favourite websites such as CBC News and YouTube provided AddThis buttons to facilitate easy tweeting. While Twitter was serving this purpose in my life, I posted quality links a couple of time a week. Once I embraced Delicious, my Twitter account lost direction.

I also spent September looking for people to follow. I immediately searched for and began to follow the 14 people recommended in our class notes. On September 7th, I changed my facebook status to "I have to follow 15 people on Twitter for a school assignment - suggestions please!" and of the 190+ people in my network, only two replied. Having had little luck with friends and family, I started looking for the Twitter badge on websites I already frequented. This strategy led me to follow The Tyee, The Onion, and Bust Magazine. Next, I tried searching for present and former classmates and professors, followed them, and had a look to see who those savvy people were following.

One frustration I stumbled across was when a friend would tell me their account name, I would carefully enter their name in the "Find People" Twitter search tool, and the results would return nothing. It seemed like the search tool was only effective for finding users with more than one or two tweets, followers, or people they were following. In other words, 'small' accounts were not returned in the search function. Booh!

I learned about Twellow, the Twitter yellow pages, from Mack Male's Elluminate session. This site not only helped me search for Twitter users by geographic location, it also confirmed what I had been suspecting: people around here just do not use Twitter. After searching for a wide variety of local cities, villages, districts, and regions, the search results returned less than one page of local users, only two of whom are local educators. This miniscule search return could also be explained by the users not setting their location in their profile, usually for privacy and safety reasons, or by the 'small' account symptom I mentioned above. Either way, Twitter at this point in time is not a tool for local networking or information sharing.

All signed up to follow people I was startled, then annoyed, by all the useless tweets showing up in my home page feed. Conversations that meant nothing to me, tweets about needing a muffin or going to bed, random links with no descriptors posted every couple of minutes - sometimes all of these things by the same user! A cacophony of noisy tweets, sounding something like this (only watch as much as you can handle, it doesn't get any better):



Perhaps because Twitter is so new and being used by many people to achieve different things, the netiquette has not yet thoroughly evolved around it. I believe Twitter would be much more effective if users had two accounts, one personal and one professional. I follow users on Twitter for professional development purposes, garnering teaching ideas and resources, not to know what they are watching on TV. On the other hand, I do enjoy the tweets from friends and family as I like to know what they are doing and how their life is going. What I found in my feed, however, is that these tweets from friends and family were drowned out by the general cacophony.

Apparently, other users must have been feeling a similar frustration as Twitter rolled out  a List feature in October that allows you to sort the people you follow into categories. Now that I have done this, my account feels more like a tool and less like a noisy burden.

Discussion of Twitter for my own personal learning

Twitter has been a good tool to explore in the last couple of months as it has reinforced the idea that just because a web 2.0 tool is free, somewhat popular, and easy to use, doesn't mean that it will fit into my life or respond to any vacant need. While I initially enjoyed the idea of mini shout-outs, it did not necessarily follow that anyone was listening. What was the point of posting content when the tweet was swallowed by the nether? The feeling was similar to a lonely person shouting at the skies not sure if anyone wanted to listen, like a solitary figure in Hyde Park's Speakers' Corner.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The concept of a status update to share with friends and family was already being filled by my facebook account. How else could I use Twitter in my personal life? To keep up with celebrities, I checked out the list of top Twitterers at Twitterholic and stumbled onto the account of Yoko Ono. As a multimedia artist, she uses her Twitter account to not only send out updates about her band and many projects, but to tweet small poems and words of wisdom.

After figuring out what twooshes and hashtags were, I started thinking about how the limitation of 140 characters could actually give rise to a new kind of poetry, similar to the haiku. Out of curiosity I typed '#haiku' in the search bar of my home page and found hundreds of users were already using Twitter to post original haikus. Next time I need some random, poetic uplifting, I can quickly search for Twitter haikus. Twitter + haiku = Twaiku?

Having played with Twitter for two months, I brought the idea of an account to the marketing team at the non-profit agency I currently work at. They were receptive to the idea, especially seeing as how few local users there are at this point in time. The virtual anonymity combined with the cost (free!) and time commitment (very low!) were attractive enough that I got the green light to create and maintain our account. Still in progress is getting our full logo small enough to upload as the profile picture, having a badge on our main website, and stretching the background image to fill the entire page of the profile. To keep the account current and vibrant, we have resolved to tweet once every business day or two. This practise will have us well-positioned if and when Twitter takes off in the local area.  

The process of building this professional Twitter account was very different from my personal one. I was much more selective in choosing who our organization would follow and conscious of maintaining our reputation. Also, the account 'Notices' settings are different. On my personal account, I have all notices turned off while the professional one has 'New Follower' and 'Direct Text Emails' turned on so that we can keep close tabs on account activity.

Discussion of Twitter in terms of teaching and learning

Laura Walker, a Director of E-Learning at a UK school, has given the following "Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter":

   1. Together we're better

   2. Global or local: you choose

   3. Self-awareness and reflective practice

   4. Ideas workshop and sounding board

   5. Newsroom and innovation showcase

   6. Professional development and critical friends (see also Kenney, 2009)

   7. Quality-assured searching

   8. Communicate, communicate, communicate

   9. Getting with the times has never been so easy!

The most obvious use of Twitter for teachers is as a quick and dirty Professional Development (ProD) tool. By following only a handful of well-chosen edu-tweeters, teachers can access an evaluated stream of links, information, and discourse in bite-sized pieces. "Following other educators on Twitter creates a 'network at my fingertips' phenomenon where people ask questions and get answers, link to great blog posts or resources, or share ideas for projects" (Richardson, 86). Because tweets are limited to a 140 characters, even very busy people are able to contribute. My top choice for teacher-librarians would be Joyce Valenza as she is constantly evaluating and implementing web 2.0 tools, providing a variety of links and comments that point you in a new or great direction.

However, finding gems such as Valenza is challenging in an environment where 80% of users are primarily navel-gazing (Rutgers University study on Mashable). One place to start in seeking out other educators that share similar subjects and content areas is on the Twitter4Teachers wiki. Here, educators can post their Twitter username under their specific field and browse a list of educators working or interested in the same field to possibly follow.

I agree with Richardson when he writes that "Twitter is a bit too Wild West for most school situations" (Richardson, 87). This hasn't prevented some teachers from embracing Twitter and finding creative uses in their classrooms and beyond. In the following video, biology teacher Paul Andersen discusses the basics of Twitter, as well as how he used Twitter to create a learning network for one of his classes (the good stuff starts around run time 3:30/9:51).



What's interesting in Andersen's discussion is that his students all seem to have cell phones and receive his class tweets as instant messages. In my rural area where cell phone coverage is often interrupted by mountain passes, many students do not have cell phones. Also, even if they did have cell phones, parents would be outraged that the teacher expected them to receive instant messages, a service that costs money.

It seems that in order to be effective, Twitter requires the teachers and students to have constant internet access. On his eLearning blog, David Hopkins encourages educators to enhance their classroom experience by "letting your students online with laptops and other devices when they're in your classroom. Use a hashtag and ask your students to use it on each tweet; this means you can easily collate tweets together at the end of the alloted task/activity/time." This reminded me of Michael Wesch's video, "A Vision of Students Today" in which students reported that they facebook through most of their classes and they bring their laptop to class but they aren't working on class stuff.  

"With scant research on the efficacy of social-networking tools such as Twitter, and few clear insights into the best (and worst) uses for them, there is little agreement among researchers and educators about how or whether Twitter-like technologies could or should be used in schools" (Manzo, 2009).

Summary

I gave Twitter a fair shot over two months and did not feel that I was getting much value back for time invested. In the future, if more local people and students start to use Twitter, then the site might become useful on a personal level. For now, I am aware of the site, have read massive amounts of writing and literature about Twitter, and am comfortable with using my account  for a variety of purposes. Maybe, as Marcia Conner suggests, I will grow to love Twitter over a more extended period of time since people "across the globe; - people smarter and busier than you - use Twitter" (2009). And they must be onto something good, right?

Works Cited (not linked in text)

Conner, M.. (2009, August). Twitter 101: Are you tweeting? T + D, 63(8), 24-25, 27. Retrieved November 22, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1833987711).

Kenney, Brian. (2009, November). With a little help from our friends. School Library Journal, 55(11), 9. Retrieved November 22, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1891472341).

Manzo, K.K.. (2009, October). Twitter lessons in 140 characters or less. Education Week, 29(8), 1, 14. Retrieved November 22, 2009 from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1891350041).