More Tweets for Twitter

Having sat through Mack D. Male's most informative session last night, I have given the Twitter application further thought. I have decided that Twitter may work well to share "real time" messages with my students, but if I want to post items that students can refer to later, the blog might be the better venue since it lends itself to archiving.

Some of my key learnings from Mack D. Male's presentation last night support some of my other readings including: being aware of the power of social media; writing about things you have a passion for or enthusiasm about and that enthusiasm breeds enthusiasm in your viewers; having knowledge or at least awareness of the workings of tech applications in teaching, learning, and communication; knowing that optimal blog length is variable, but that most of the time one screen length might be enough; and understanding that the blog is beginning to morph into a website. This brings me to a useful conclusion for my personal inquiry. I toyed with using Twitter to reach my students or a wiki, but now I am sold on the blog. Blogs lend themselves to archiving; whereas, Twitter does not. Viewers can comment on my blog posting, while wikis are largely collaborative tools that lend themselves to editing and possible change. Certainly, I could always check the wiki history, but at times that could be a little cumbersome. I can link so many other sites and tools to my blog that students and other faculty and staff can access or re-visit. However, one last thing I learned is that using a combination of Web 2.0 tools is probably the best approach since each tool is useful in its own particular way. It was interesting to hear Mack D. Male agree that his best approach to accomplishment is continuous partial attention; i.e., multitasking. That is a clear statement on how many of our students functuin.

Beyond other relevant literature, Mack D. Male and Honeycutt and Herring (2009) support the notion that Twitter is a useful tool for conveying news instantaneously, but that it was not necessarily meant to provide a venue for analytic, indepth assessment of situations. It is also functional for collaboration and generation of quick responses. The idea of checking your Twitter feed is not exhausting since each post is very short, so most users are not dreading the idea of going there. Johnson (2009) notes that Twitter is useful for status reports, the intent, I believe was for business, but student progress indicators could factor in keeping with the need for confidentiality.

The PC Magazine (2009) presents useful tips for using Twitter: 10 tips for beginners and 6 tips for making it useful. What I found intersting was that people could use their camera phones to takes pictures, then they could post them in Twitter. Surely, this would make real time news even more meaningful. Thus, Twitter allows you to follow up-to-the-minute news, ask for help, promote your work, search for work, stay in contact with friends, and meet celebrities. All of this is for the most part educationally relevant.

Just as we had discussed effective headlines for our blogs, Thompson's (2009) Pistachio post provides tips for constructing Twitter-friendly headlines. Keep them short; avoid puns; use key words to optimize search engine success, use hashtags [#] to categorize tweets by content, deal with one story per tweet, provide direct links to a story rather than to a homepage, and remember, you don't have enough characters to provide subheadings. All good advice. One final point, learning Twitter lingo is a must. Once you get into it, you soon get the hang of it: twitter, tweople, twoosh, tweetup, tweetdeck, twellow, and the like. Indeed, what fun!