What's Twitter For?

Tonya Joosten talked a lot about Twitter at Monday's Ed Tech Academy session. She suggested that both Twitter and Facebook might be helpful in fostering a sense of "connectedness" for students taking an online class. Many of us in that session were brand new to Twitter and are keeping a skeptical mind about the practical value of Twitter for Roane State students. That's fine.

Several people have asked me if Roane State students actually use Twitter. I can't offer statistics, but I do see lots of online activity by looking over the shoulders of students in library dcomputer labs. Last year, most web browsers in the library computer lab were filled with Facebook. Students keep Facebook open, even while doing other work in Momentum or while writing a paper. That is still true, but this past semester I have noticed about a third of computer lab screens are taken with Twitter. I have had interesting conversations with students at offsite campuses about their Twitter habits and have noticed smartphone users tweeting a bit.

Odds are good that every student in your class has a Facebook account and is pretty active with it. I would be surprised if most of the students in any class actively use Twitter. That said, I would bet that every class has more than a few Twitter users in it.

I'd love to hear your experiences with using social media in the class.

To all my new Twitter colleagues, welcome! I have come to love Twitter just lately. It took me a while to catch on with it. I had an account for over a year before I really started to use it. For me, Twitter is an extraordinary professional development tool.

Hashtags let me follow conversations on topics I care about like librarianship, mobile learning, mobile librarianship, higher education and educational technology.

Twitter is also a great way to meet and converse with interesting, like-minded people at conferences. I've met people this way at the SACS annual meeting, the TBR Mobile Summit and most recently the ALA TechSource webinar series. Conference hashtags offer an easy "back channel" to extend conversations from across and between sessions.

Even better, Twitter has allowed me to converse with people I would never otherwise have had the chance to talk with -- experts and authorities in their field. Twitter is more open and informal than email.

If you are new to Twitter and wondering what it's all about, just stick with it a for a few months. Follow people that are interested in the things you are interested in. Find out who they follow and follow some of those people as well. Retweet things that deserve to be shared and don't be afraid to contribute to a conversation. Don't get obsessed with collecting lots of followers. The goal is to curate a community of people who share your interests and can lead you to the best ideas, articles and insights quickly.

I still use Facebook but Twitter has become my friend. It is a massively large conversation tailored to my professional and personal interests. I can send an idea, thought or observation out and often get immediate, pertinent feedback. I have come to think of tweets as idea rockets. They move fast, travel far and carry us to surprising places.