What do you say to people who ask, Twitter? What’s that?
I’ve had problems just lately getting Twitter in my office where I work. Twitter is at http://www.twitter.com . A technician offered to help restore service but asked me to first explain what Twitter is. I wrote:
Twitter is an online social networking software that is unique in that it limits all correspondence at any one time to 240 characters, the limit of text in an SMS message.
People, in my case teaching professionals and other educators, form networks and continually exchange information via Twitter. Information could be a tip on a good website for edtech or teaching, or some breaking news, or an invitation to a synchronous event that you wouldn’t know was happening unless you happened to see the message. It’s instant communication that is directed right to the heart of a social network, so its value depends on the strength of the people you ‘follow’. It’s become quite popular and people I interact with online have come to depend on it for JIT (Just in Time) informal learning. There are many well known luminaries and experts in many fields on Twitter, and one can easily ‘follow’ them and enjoy reading their 240 character musings on whatever’s on their mind. These are often quite informative, so Twitter allows access to people and information not replicated so efficiently or effectively anywhere else online.
It’s having a huge impact on many aspects of life, not just education. The recent US presidential candidates both had Twitter accounts for example. When fires raged in California the Twitter network helped people locate hotel rooms in hours of chaos. Commuters use Twitter on their mobile phones to form networks with other commuters and avoid traffic congestion. People at conferences use it to discuss presentations live amongst themselves and sometimes also to interact with the presenter (I’ve sometimes interacted with people in my audience via Twitter in recent talks I’ve given).
My latest blog posting happens to be about educational uses of Twitter: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008/11/twitter-whats-in-it-for-education.html
and I recently wrote an article about it:
Stevens, Vance. (2008). Trial by Twitter: The rise and slide of the year’s most viral microblogging platform. TESL-EJ, Volume 12, Number 1: http://tesl-ej.org/ej45/int.html
By way of further background Twitter was blocked in the UAE by the Emirates proxy until just recently, when many social network sites were removed from the immoral lists. It still works over normal UAE Internet (it’s in fact no more innocuous than an SMS message on a mobile phone) but it stopped working here in my office a week or so ago. Hopefully the technician will be able to get it back. Meanwhile I can still Tweet via my laptop in my office :-)
