The Ed Techie

Twitter guide

Next year I plan to get my students to sign up to Twitter at the start of the course (it won't be compulsory though). My hope is that it will help with social presence, knowledge sharing, support and a form of micro-recording as they study. I have tried with IM before to promote this 'I bumped into Jenny outside the refectory the other day and she mentioned this great paper' type of dialogue, but ultimately IM is just a bit to instrusive I feel. So I'm hoping Twitter will be useful - I'll let you know how it goes anyway.

With this in mind, I was pleased to come across Caroline Middlebrook's Big Juice Twitter Guide, which I've pointed my students at (hat tip: Judy O'Connell).

Twitter dreams

While I agree with Henry James in "tell a dream, lose a reader" I thought I'd share a rather scary development. For the past two nights I have dreamt in twitter mode. I haven't dreamt of Twitter, I've dreamt in Twitter, that is my dream has constituted lots of short update messages from various people (some dead, some alive, some imaginary). I'm sure there's a piece of modernistic fiction 'The twitters of the dead' to be written by someone, but not me. I'm just concerned that I'm now having dreams 2.0.

Psychotherapists need not comment.

Twitter potential

Okay, having done a negative, now on to the positives of using Twitter.

The social/professional mix is intriguing. People will post links and quotes, but also comments about their hotel room. I follow Scott Leslie, D'Arcy Norman and Brian Lamb, so feel as though I was almost present at the Open Education conference. I have found some good sites through people such as Guy Kawasaki (who I am convinced never sleeps, or is in fact an artificial intelligence program). I have also used it for work, sending someone a message who I saw was online and was supposed to be in a virtual meeting with.

But I've been struggling to get my voice right. I'm happy with Facebook status updates, I get the right tone, but I'm not sure whether I should be posting social chat stuff (I'm off to the cinema), or professional stuff ('Interesting post here') or self-promotion ('New blog post'). It turns out that it's all three probably, as Chris Brogan says in this interview. As with blogging, it's taken a while but I feel as though I'm finding the affordance of the medium now.

Which leaves the question - why? Particularly if not many people are hearing what I say anyway. For me it's about the potential. Next year I would like to get all my students to sign up, so they have this constant low-level contact which is much less intrusive than IM. I think it will be an excellent back-channel around the content. I would also like to see it used institutionally - if there was an OU twitter, it would provide a great knowledge sharing and social bonding mechanism. I'm perservering then, in the hope these come to pass.

So if you're not on Twitter, give it a try, I'll follow you. And if you tried it a while ago and gave up, give it another go, we can follow each other. You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/mweller 

Twitter - elitist?

I've been using twitter for the past couple of weeks, so thought I'd post some thoughts on it. The next one will be positive (see AJ, I'm keeping my posts short), but in this one I'll look at the negatives.

My big issue with Twitter is that it's not symmetrical in the way it forms relationships. In Facebook, if I make you my friend, then I am automatically your friend as well, ie we see each other's profile, so it's a mutual trust and respect. This is not the case in Twitter. I can follow you, but you are under no obligation to follow me.

The result of this is that I follow people who aren't following me, and so while I can see their tweets, they don't see mine. Far from feeling part of a global conversation one is left with the feeling of being outside the party. And rather than being democratic, it seems rather elitist to me - it is hot amongst the real neterati because we get to hear all their thoughts while they don't have to listen to the unwashed (although bless Scoble, if you follow him, he automatically follows you). It ends up being more akin to traditional broadcast than one based around dialogue.

The new morning routine

I have a morning routine now, which has evolved over the past year or so. It's remarkably different from even a couple of years ago, largely as a result of becoming a blogger I think. Here it is:

After the school run I sit at the laptop with a cup of tea and bowl of muesli (if I'm indulging - marmite on toast).

1. Firstly, I check email, delete all the spam messages, do any quick responses, and mark any more detailed ones for later.
2. I check messages in the student forum for the course I run.
3. So far, so 1990s. Next I go to my blog, check stats, and comments and respond on any comments.
4. Then I pop in to Facebook, check my news feed, update status and look at any messages or notifications.
5. By this time Twitteroo is loaded so I catch up on all the tweets from the US or Canada of the people I am following. I follow any urls that have been twitted and look interesting.
6. Lastly, to Google Reader to look at any new blog posts of the 112 blogs I subscribe to. I will scan most of these, ignore a few, read some, and respond to maybe one or two.
7. Now I'm ready to start work.

And here's some thought on what this routine reveals:

• It's a mixture of social and professional. Most of my Facebook friends, blogs and Tweeters are professional peers but what they post is often a mix of social updates and relevant resources.
• I'm more connected to what is happening in my field than I was before. I didn't used to start every day by reading an academic journal, but I will usually find one academically interesting post or resource before I've finished my cup of tea.
• It's expanding. Since being a blogger I have had the additional burden/privilege of tending one's own blog garden, but also I have become a much more active blog reader, so now have a lot of posts to get through in my aggregator. And then I added Facebook in to the mix, and more recently Twitter. I don't seem to have dropped anything though. At this rate my morning routine will be my all day routine.
• I'm developing new skills in scanning, interpreting, reading and writing. Given the expansionist desires of my morning routine, I have developed further skills in information processing - I'm not on a par with ultra bloggers, but I can scan my Google reader list quickly, and determine which posts to follow. It may not be always reliable, but it is reliable enough. I know how to get in to Facebook, get what I want and get out quickly. I am currently trying to develop my Twitter voice (more on this in a later post).

Any other activities that should form part of a connected morning routine?