You Say I'm a Twit Like It's a Bad Thing

It's true... I have confirmed the belief of many who know me, and have officially become a twit.  Or a twitterer.  I tweet.  Whatever.

Further expanding my exploration of web 2.0, I finally gave in about a week ago to the prodding of a couple of my staff members (cough, cough - you know who you are), and signed on to Twitter. Simplistically speaking, it's a form of instant messaging, I suppose you could say, which can go to a wide or narrow audience, as you choose - but which is far more powerful than IM'ing, so please don't write it off as nothing new to see.  A more formal name for it is micro-blogging.

I'll admit - at first, I failed to see how it could be any more than one more way for us to post about our lives endlessly and nauseatingly.  And there is certainly that potential.

The key, however, appears to lie in those you choose to "follow", and those who choose to follow you.  There's the power, as I've realized just in the last few days.  If you've got a sufficiently broad network of followers/followees, in areas that are relevant to you, then those random and sundry little tweets can contain little gems of information that can prove very useful.  You can ignore info; you can read it and forget it; or you can explore further when intrigued. 

An example - while working online, I happened to look over at my twitter updates (provided by twitbin), and saw a reference to an article about web2.0 in the classroom that seems pretty interesting - gives the big picture, and gives some concrete teacher-friendly examples.    Mark Franek, a dean and teacher in Philadelphia, writes in the article,

When students know that anyone in the school with an Internet
connection – or around the world, for that matter – can read what they
have written or created, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking
improves, not to mention the final product.One of my students recently commented that her blog is like a MySpace site dressed up and ready for its first job interview.

He writes of using an internet scavenger hunt to engage students in "The Great Gatsby", and of using YouTube to locate advertisements in foreign language classes.  Of studying race relations, and electoral races, all with the power of the web.

You can read the full article here.  (thanks for the link, M Coleman!)

I likely wouldn't have come across the article, short of doing some big-time web searching myself, if not for my fellow twitterers.  And just today alone, the people in my VERY small circle (apparently I'm antisocial online, in addition to in real life) have been tweeting either to share or to locate information relating to classroom management, the read/write web, tech support pages, iphoto, the invisible web, skype, and student engagement.  That's all in just the last 12 hours, with a small group...

And that's the power of it.  The power of quick, simple, yet potentially profound connections with professionals who may be on journeys similar to our own - further along the path, newer on the path, or even right where we are.  (BTW, I wrote this entire post using ScribeFire, which allowed me to construct this post without actually being 'at' my blog... and guess where I learned about ScribeFire... yep, on Twitter).

Oh, and lots of tweets about football, too.  :)

Nothing twitty about that, I'm thinkin'.

            

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, twitter, professional development, microblogging

Powered by ScribeFire.

Comments

[Marie Coleman]

And now that you are using Firefox a bit more, here's a link to our wiki posting from last year's "Tips and Tricks":
http://lwit.pbwiki.com/Browser%20Tips%20and%20Tricks%20(using%20Firefox)

[CGilcher]

I'm hurt that you didn't mention how some of us use twitter to procrastinate, or how brilliantly I shared my house-work playlist complete with commentary. (j/k)
For me, twitter has opened so many doors for professional discourse, and personal dialogs. My goal is to recruit 3 more peeps by the end of the month. I already know whom I will target.