• The Internet has become social; we now “share, connect, and create with many, many others of like minds and interests” (p. 85).
• Now, more than 1 billion people are online through the Internet.
• The “Explosion of Twitter”
o A microblogging phenomenon introduced in 2006.
o Implemented by educators as “a powerful professional development and communications tool” (p. 86).
o TWEET! This is the term used to refer to a Twitter update.
o On Twitter, people “ask questions and get answers, link to great blog posts or resources, or share ideas for projects as they go throughout the day.”
o This “running river” of conversations has been infamously used by celebrities as a tool to break up with one another publicly.
o In education, however, it has a very constructive purpose: an immediate transmittance of ideas between professionals.
o How to get started?
• Go to Twitter.com and sign up for an account.
• Begin “following” friends, celebrities, or other public figures for updates and a virtual subscription to their tweets.
• Also see Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter.
• You will begin receiving their tweets when you log in.
• To have people follow you, enlist some friends to begin.
• Use the “@” symbol to link to their Twitter name for them to receive your tweet.
• Others will begin following as they see your Twitter name linked to your friends.
o What about Twitter for students? Richardson describes Twitter as “a boon or a bane” and “a bit too Wild West for most school situations” (p. 88). Better left among colleagues to avoid it becoming out of hand.
• Another option: Social bookmarking services
o There are more than 10 billion Web pages online.
o Organize your information through online bookmarking services
o You can save links, annotate them with keywords or “tags,” and share them with others.
o Some social bookmarking sites
• Delicioius.com – Delicious links you to everyone else who has bookmarked a site the same as you.
• Diigo.com – Allows you to begin constructing “your own little piece of the Web” and to easily collaborate with fellow educators.
• Diigo as a tool for individualized instruction: Why not allow students to put up individual questions for discussion among like-minded people?
• Diigo as a professional development tool: “If you are in a school in which four, five or even eight people are teaching political science, either set up a Diigo group that you can share in terms of adding resources, or, at the very least, create tags in your individual accounts that you each can subscribe to. It’s a great way to develop a highly personalized, organized, searchable archive of information for your curriculum” (p. 97)
o A few additional social bookmarking sites: LibraryThing.com, Shelfari.com. Explore!
I personally don't Twitter. I signed up to it only to follow someone who was trying to get a lot of followers for his Twitter, and now all kinds of people I've never met "follow" me, even though I don't even post. Personally, I think it's a little too close for comfort, the thought of having a billion TWEETS coming at me a day, and total strangers reading what I write! What do you think?
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