Twitter 501 blog post

It’s warm today…about 12 degrees, the snow is nearly all melted, and today I am enjoying an extended listen to the sounds of Thee Silver Mt. Zion. Maybe I’m a little too pensive for my own good on this overcast spring day, and maybe I should be pressing harder to get my projects further ahead, but since so close to Easter, I almost feel my Self slowing down for a well needed rest after such an intense and laborious winter season.

I suppose now is the time of year when I usually get out my worn copy of Siddhartha, and let Hesse’s words carry me through the spring time. This year, much like last year, my master’s project has me running crazy to meet deadlines so there hasn’t been any Siddhartha for me for nearly three years. Still, I carry forward the many readings I’ve enjoyed about Hesse’s character, and springtime reminds me of the renewing of the earth into a time of bounty that will arrive upon us in a few weeks as the trees, flowers and grass begin to bud. Likewise, as I mentioned, my project is also returning full circle from within itself, as it emerges into a larger scope of understanding about research into leadership capacity.

In thinking of the ‘full circle’ of connectedness between myself and my friends, and the unbroken circle between my studies and my professional career, I’d like to begin this week’s blog with a couple of boss infographics I always enjoy referring back to that make me realize that even 40 or 50 years ago, the recursive and reflexive nature of systems thinking was nearly as prevalent as it is today, but that technology was still striving to catch up with the advanced thinking patterns of modern civilization.

Check these out:

Each week I am totally engrossed in learning about Web2 tech from Lee LeFever’s In Plain English videos, and this week is no exception. I am presently gleaning the university eJournal database for current research related to Twitter, and there is some information available, but this weeks Trailfire has a plethora of text material that can’t be beat. However, Joanne linked us to a Trailfire article that, IMO, trumps the Plain English video for Twitter: Charlene Kingston’s Twitter for Beginners (SocialMediaDIYWorkshop.com, 2010). Topics included in this eBook are (and I will list each page/chapter because this resource is SOOO well organized, so exhaustive, and so intuitive to 21^st century learners):

Why you need this

What is Twitter?

Twitter is Like A Party

What Do People Tweet?

You Twitter Goal

Your Twitter Profile

Account Checklist

Whom Should I Follow?

How Do I Find People?

Twitter Timelines

Someone Followed Me

Twitter Community

What Do I Tweet?

Tweets With Links

Retweets

@Replies

Direct Messages

Tweet Anatomy

Twitter Anatomy (cont.)

Tweet Status

Conversation Tips

The More, The Merrier

Weekly Twitter Activity

Twitter To Go

Twitter & Text Messages

Keys For Success

About the Author

I am still getting accustomed to blogging on a blogpage, and my experience with microblogging is still seriously underdeveloped. I installed the TwitterBar app for FireFox, and it is useful for popping a quick Tweet while working/surfing, but I haven’t been able to find my own identity as a Tweeter yet this term because of the intense amount of work that each of the WEB2 tools has required from me, a newbie to Web2.0 technology. This week will hopefully prove to be rewarding through experiential learning, and I look forward to Friday to see how my Twitter profile/account has developed from the resources I will use to make my voice heard.

~rob

Sunday

Okay, today I was totally crazy with getting the first section of my master’s project completed, and by afternoon my brain was running in two modes: first, it was trying not to think about leadership capacity; second, it was 100% absolutely primed to work, to think, to analyze, and to generate thought. So, I’m sure you are thinking that I opted for route two, and I got totally immersed in more data, right?! Well, uh, you see, hmmm, uh, I chose for the first of the two streams because I really needed a break after the amount of work I’d done during the past two weeks.

I read and organized my research for this week’s posting, and I found a number of useful articles about Twitter that helped me to make sense of Twitter, and microblogging in general.

To be honest, I ended up bouncing from Tweeter to Tweeter, and I actually spent 6 hours reading tweets from other users. Regrettably, reading Tweets doesn’t net a higher final grade for a course, but the knowledge and information acquired from learning how to navigate using a social networking utility is priceless.

I read Atkinson’s (2010) interesting book review of The Backchannel: How Audiences Are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever, and I was pleased to read that conferences now offer a screen for everyone in the audience to see what is being Tweeted about during the conference. This was a concern that I raised during class last summer, that there were 40 or so students in the classroom, yet there was no venue for us to communicate with one another during the presentations. How much knowledge would be available for conference organizers to collect comments from audience as participants in conversation about the discussion created and maintained by the speaker. And, while I don’t think it is necessary for the speaker to engage in the dialog, it would be great to be able to post a question that could be monitored and placed in queue for the speaker to address at the end of the talk. There have been too many instances when I was at a conference and felt that there should be more connection between members of the audience to generate increased rapport with the topic and, inadvertently, with the speaker. I can only hope that the future finds more interactive discussion between classmates in a lecture hall to get students involved. I mean, MTV allows me to send texts to their broadcasts to say hi to friends who are also watching the same shows, so why in the world can’t institutions of higher learning provide a more life-like venue for communications between students?

Okay, and one last point I really need to address: Neil Gaiman’s use of Twitter to create online stories! Way to go Neil! I remember when I was in teacher’s college at Althouse, I was in class, and I wrote the first line of a story and I asked each student in the class to write the next consecutive line for the story until everyone had contributed to the story which I took time to illustrate. Neil has done the same thing online using Twitter, and I think that is a beautiful use of technology to create a wonderful piece of sociological history. I think Neil has an advantage because he already had followers interested in his works because of his established status as an author, but that is an aside for such a brilliant idea. (*I am tipping my hat to Neil*)

~rob

Monday and Tuesday

My Twitter account is more active these days, and I am posting a few items here and there, but I can’t say I’ve found my Twitter voice. I have a lot to learn about to integrate my readings into a networking tool that requires such a limited number of characters, yet requires the same expressiveness that a ‘full-size’ blog requires. The language-specific format of Twitter is also somewhat intimidating for a new user. It would be so easy, I mean wa-a-a-a-y too easy to take on the luddite approach that Keen talks about in his March/April 2010 article Reinventing the Luddite: An Interview with Andrew Keen. Being new to Twitter, and somewhat resistant to acquiring a new vocabulary for its use, I find myself agreeing far too much with Keen’s cynical view of the Internet. Even agreeing with Keen makes me feel embarrassed, and like a nabob for not giving Twitter a fair shot before getting to know the tool intimately; I suppose I might be looking for a way out even before committing to the tool.

While I am still bouncing from Tweeter to Tweeter, I learned from e-Connect journal (2010) that “A Twibe is a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic….”  So, back to Twitter For Beginners for me!

When I log in to Twitter I find my account is receiving new posts from other users, and when I follow some of the directions from the Twitter For Beginners, the system doesn’t provide the search results for me like I think it should. I like Kingston’s (2010) analogy that “Twitter is like walking through a large party and eavesdropping on conversations as you walk past people.” However, I’m not sure what I am hearing because the language used by Tweeters is not familiar to me. I looked through Kingston’s ebook, but did not find a lexicon for understanding the contractive forms of words most Twitter users speak with.

Kingston’s story about Twitter makes sense about how people are communicating, and the examples she provides on page six are excellent, but they don’t clearly explain how to get involved in a conversation with others. It seems that by making a post I am posting to everyone, and not to a specific person or group of people I’ve learned are called a Twibe.

I realize that I must seem delayed in my use of this tool, but two days of little accomplishment have left me frustrated to no end.

~rob

Wednesday

I spent the night playing with the settings, design, background, profile, connections, notices… and still nothing to show for my attempts to harness the power of this utility.

Kingston (2010) provides a guide for getting users engaged in dialog, and I tried using some of these ideas, but my posts aren’t flowing the way I hoped they would. Here is one of Kingston’s lists:

Here are some suggestions for tweet ideas:

- What you are doing (but don’t be boring).

- Your current business challenge.

- What you are reading with details so others can read along (if interested).

- Announce a new blog post, press release, product release, promotion, etc.

- Share an insight or humorous look at your current challenges or situation.

- Ask a question. Your followers may have an opinion or offer you some insight based on

their own experiences.

I replied to a Tweet made by one of the people I am following, even though I am not sure how I became their follower, or why I am following AsteroidWatch, but I replied to their Tweet, and Twitter indicated that I am not able to post for some reason.

Thursday and Friday

Still not able on either of these days to bring my understanding to the fore, and while I am becoming more proficient with reading and following Twitter users, my posts only get out to the general Twitter community, and I can’t figure out how to get engaged in a one-on-one conversation with other users. When I make a Tweet, I am not able to make the posting appear as a bit.ly file that Kingston explains in her eBook. I followed the steps in the book again over these two days, I mean, I have followed the steps from page one through page 29, and I am not able to get a hang of how to use Twitter. I think my initial enthusiasm about the eBook was too high because I was looking for a quick solution to being able to use Twitter. I watched the Twitter In Plain English video again on Thursday, but I was not able to get enough information from the video to make a successful post that was a reply to another users, or to be able to send a Twitter from my email, nor to send a Twitter to my email account.

I keep thinking back to the Luddite article (Keen, 2010) I read earlier this week, but I don’t want to admit defeat with this tool since I have had pretty good success with all of my experiences so far this term, despite delays and setbacks (*see VoiceThread post*).

I am not sure what or how I am doing incorrectly, but I will have to take a break since I will be away Saturday and Sunday. I will try again Sunday evening to get my Twitter account up to speed.

~rob

Sunday

Okay, I tried using the # symbol again this evening in an attempt to search Twitter for posts related to #Lost, my favorite show. But, there is nothing appearing through Twitter when I enter this term in the search box.

I am still not able to reply or retweet for some reason. I will keep using Twitter until I can make this tool work for me, because I am really getting the hang of it, but a week with Twitter is not enough for me, and I still can’t figure out why this is the case.

Reflections on the process of learning about the tool

Learning this week seems to be hitting a deficit with me for some reason. Despite the six or seven hours each night that I spent trying to use my Twitter account, I was unable to pull my learning together into a comprehensible form. That’s not to say I learned nothing, au contraire! This week I learned a lot about Twitter from the readings I did through Joanne’s Trailfire, and through the readings I collected from the university eJournal database, but it seems that none of the instructions I encountered during this week were enough to provide clear enough insight according to my learning style that could present a clear enough picture in my mind to give me a successful jump-off point to use this social networking utility effectively. I read Cindy King’s (2010) article 8 Easy Ways to Network on Twitter with interest, and I tried following the steps Cindy lists for being a successful Twitter user, but I was not able to make the # symbol net the results I wanted from my week on Twitter:

#4: Shout Out to Others

If you want to connect with someone on Twitter and just don’t know where to start, here are some ways of simply shouting out to people on Twitter to get them to notice you.

• Consider mentioning them for #FollowFriday.  You do this by simply saying something nice about the person, include their Twitter ID and “#FollowFriday” or “#ff”.
•  

I think with more exposure to this tool I will find great success in using it. I remember how Joanne talked about using one of her accounts for connecting with family, and another account for career use. I hope that I can get to a level of proficiency that I will be able to differentiate and delineate what my own needs are with each tool, and to be able to have followers and people I follow whom I know well enough to receive postings from me without getting offended. I have been trying to make replies to people I follow, but none of the replies seem to work, and I don’t want to send AsteroidWatch 200 Tweets of Hi, or ‘just checking to see if this works’.

I found some people linked as friends on my Facebook account, but was not able to successfully get a Tweet linked to them either.

Is it just me? Or is it possible there might actually be an issue with my Twitter account? I really think it must be me in this case, because I can post a Tweet to the Twitter community and it posts, it is just that I cannot get my posts to individual users successfully: I tried Joanne and Brandi, but with no result. I really wish one of the Twitter geniuses would publish an eBook Twitter Troubleshooting with a list of common fixes drawn from websites where people post their issues with a Web2 tools. Trust me, if I knew how to gather such information I would definitely get to writing such a book tomorrow.

Discussion of the tool in terms of my own personal learning

I think I can accurately provide a response to my own personal learning with Twitter during the past week. I started this week a little bit skeptical about Twitter because I mistakenly read Keen’s (2010) article about Ludditism related to Twitter. Fortunately, when I caught myself being a Luddite I was able to push Keen’s voice into oblivion and focus on the task at hand: using Twitter to communicate with others. Unfortunately, I was not able to make my communications known to other in ways I wanted to, and I am really feeling a strong sense of discouragement and frustration with Twitter, which is disappointing because it seems to be the most talked about tool of all the Web2 tools we’ve researched this term. Every news cast, most weekly shows, all websites are promoting Twitter, but I have found non success with this game. My own learning is that I am very familiar with Twitter, and I now know my account inside and out. I have read the step-by-step guides to using Twitter, but the steps for me don’t seem to produce the results I need. My experience with Twitter seem very reflective of the title of Sexton’s (2010) article The Day the Search Stood Still. Sexton’s introductory quote sums up the feelings I have about searching Twitter this week: “At the very least, we ought to recognize that the concept of ‘discovery’ has outgrown the confines of the functionality known as ‘search.’” This week truly became a lesson in discovery, when I intended it to begin and end as a search and conquer mission. Flexibility is a virtue when it comes to learning with Web2 tools.

Discussion of the tool in terms of teaching and learning

Young’s (2010) article Teaching with Twitter: Not for the faint of heart, raises an important issue for technology in the classroom.

“Opening up a Twitter-powered channel in class—which professors at other universities are experimenting with as well—alters classroom power dynamics and signals to students that they’re in control. Fans of the approach applaud technology that promises to change professors’ role from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.” Those phrases are familiar to education reformers, who have long argued that education must be more interactive to hold the interest of today’s students.”

My experience with education in general is that 21^st century learners in the Alberta school system are intuitively wired to need a classroom guide as opposed to a teacher. Even without Twitter, the days of a sole distributor of knowledge in the classroom called a teacher are passé. Students want develop personal connections with the facilitators who plan lessons and work to create and fosters classrooms environs in which students can explore and discover knowledge in a scaffolded environment. Students are taught early-on in their school experiences, (kindergarten and grade one) to investigate, practice, explore, and try new ways of learning, with provincial curricula indicating this is the best practice for new learners to develop skills. Twitter may be viewed as a scapegoat to shift attention away from older teaching styles that haven’t caught up with constructivism.

My own recent university experience indicates that professors are trying their best to integrate technology into their teaching practices, but that students, themselves, must take more ownership of their own learning if they are to participate as coconstructors of knowledge in learning environment or in power relationships of decision-making.

~rob

References

Adult Ed Twibe (2010). Techniques. Mar, 60. Retrieved from http://www.library.ualberta.ca/databases/databaseinfo/

Atkinson, C. (2010). [Review of the bookThe back channel: How audiences are using twitter and social media and changing presentations forever]. Available From University of Alberta Web site http://www.library.ualberta.ca/databases/databaseinfo/

Gaiman, N. (2010) Twitter tale takes off. Scholastic Scope 58(12) 3.

Garcia, D. (2010, Oct). Hey Jude. Infographic posted to loveallthis.tumblr.com

Jeannr (2010, Oct) For the better understanding of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Infographic posted to jennr.tumblr.com

Keen, A. (2010) Reinventing the Luddite: An interview with Andrew Keen. The Futurist, Mar/Apr, 35-36.

LeFever, L. (Producer). (2010, March 20). Twitter in Plain English. Common Craft Podcast retrieved from http://trailfire.com/joannedegroot/trailview/77917

Sexton, W. (2010) The day the search stood still. Jan/Feb, 6-12. Retrieved from www.infotoday.com

Young, J. (2010) Teaching with twitter: Not for the faint of heart. The Education Digest, Mar, 9-12.