Academic uses for Twitter? June 10, 2008
Posted by Phoebe in : Cool tools , trackbackA 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?
Comments»
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.
[...] service. It recalls the discussions I heard recently about the different level of involvement folks from my institution felt at an academic conference when the audience for various talks was using Twitter during the programs to share comments, [...]