Over a month ago I declared my intention to stop blogging here and to have a go at microblogging my learning technology / teaching and learning thoughts via Twitter instead. As I wanted this to be an ‘experiment’ (rather than an excuse not to blog) I feel that I should pause and take time to share some of my findings so far:

• I have ‘tweeted’ 67 times in the last month (www. twitter.com/helenhrsc)
• My tweets come via a combination of Tiny Twitter (from my mobile), TwitterGadget (in my iGoogle) and TwitterBar in Firefox, depending where I am and what I am doing when I want to share
• I have had several ‘conversations’ with fellow Twitterers/tweeters
• I have used a suggestion on Twitter to help respond to a query about a resource
• I haven’t once experienced bloggers block, as I used to when writing this blog
• I enjoy the spontaneous nature of sharing what I am looking at, finding out and thinking at the point when it happens and of knowing there is a record of this if I want to go back and look at it again
• I like reading what others have to say … provided it is mostly about ‘learning tech’ and not too much about ‘stuff’.

That last point is the biggest negative for me about Twitter – i.e. having loads of tweets to trawl through about the games that people were playing or what they had for tea. Maybe if I was using this as a purely social tool I would appreciate that but with my specific work focus of twittering about learning technology / teaching and learning then it can be a pain … hence my appreciation of the suggestion of the 90-10 rule for successful Twitter networking from Jack Humphrey!

And finally, since I have been doing this ‘experiement’ I seem to have heard about lots of other Twitter stuff, the most potentially useful (IMHO) of which I’ll share here:

• Twit Pics to share photos via Twitter – http://twitpic.com
• Twitter Search to search Twitter without having to be logged in – http://search.twitter.com
• Tweet Party to create groups of people to tweet to - http://tweetparty.com 
• Ask On Twitter displays tweets with the phrase ‘does anyone know’ – http://www.askontwitter.com

Enough of an update for now … off to tweet about this blog …

Tags: microblog, Twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 11:36 am and is filed under Learning Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.