A lot of the technoscenti have become coverts to Twitter in the last six months. Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows you to post 140-character snippets (via text message, web or other media) and have them read at the site, fed into your Facebook status page, or delivered in a variety of other ways. I know an office that uses Twitter instead of an old-fashioned in/out board, and Twitter got a lot of press as a result of the “revolt” at the SXSW Keynote Address.
But is Twitter relevant to academic work? I didn’t think so until I read Lenore’s blog post about using Twitter at a blogger’s meetup, and her musings:
Despite the high quality of both the planned and unplanned sessions, the best part, by far, was meeting other Twitter users. It was a tremendous amount of fun observing and participating in conversations during the actual sessions while also tweeting about what the presenter was trying to convey. …
I was effectively live blogging or taking notes on what I considered to be the main points of each session and others who were attending the conference or following along from a remote location, could see them using twemes.com or hashtags.org.
And then I found a series of posts at AcademHack discussing using Twitter in the classroom. This is from the faculty perspective – but certainly a study group of students could work together to take collaborative notes in a lecture using hashtags. What do you think, faculty, and students?
Written by Phoebe Acheson
Good post, and Lenore’s right. I follow her Tweets, and met her through blogging. And that’s the best thing about online networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and blogs – when online acquaintances meet face to face, community ties get stronger. I wrote about how this undergirds the BlogTogether group here in the Triangle.
btw, I’m @mistersugar on Twitter.