Twitter, What is this thing?

[Ron Bosch]

Is anybody else twittering? I have started using it recently and I have to say that at first I wasn't real sure what the point of it was. I am starting to see that it is an interesting way to keep up with what people that you follow are doing and a way to let people who are following you know what you are doing.
I am just curious what other people are thinking about Twitter and any uses they see for using it, other than it is just kind of fun.

[Daniel Hanly]

I've heard that Twitter can be highly useful in the field of education, not teaching, but in order for university lecturers and other educators to see what your doing in the field of education. It helps you build up contacts. If a particular lecturer is doing a research paper and he wants to stay in contact with certain people, then Twitter is a brilliant way to do it. But as many other people have said in this discussion forum, I too cannot see the pedagogical applications for it.

[Enzo Silva]

here are a few posts of mine on the matter:

http://tweaklearning.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/microblogging-and-lea...

http://tweaklearning.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/twittercamp/

[Ellen Chisa]

I recently started twittering. At first tweets just seemed like a very pretentious way to assume everyone cared about what you're doing. However, I also set up a twitter for more broad concepts- specifically only productive things I was working on.

I find to some extent people learn more effectively if they have a good awareness of what they're spending hours on. Thus maybe if everytime a student started a new homework assignment, they could "tweet" it so they know the start time, then check again at stop time, they'll have a better awareness of how their hours are being used over the long term.

Alternatively, it would give a comprehensive list of assignments completed that would be online.

I think in particular microblogging might be more effective in different age ranges. For elementary schoolers, they probably aren't frequently using things like Twitter anyway, and probably don't spend large quantities of any one assignment.

Another usage is through Yammer- a version of Twitter designed for employees to communicate work they are doing to other employees in a company, preventing email overload and increasing awareness. This could good for group projects if used in a similar manner.

Though there are a bunch of possible applications, it doesn't seem like eLearning is necessarily the market so much as being able to have an extension to learning in the classroom.

[Baby Jane Lacaba]

Twitter is a microblogging site... It is very useful specially to those who plan marketing of their own sites.

[Sandy Hirtz]

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