Thursday, January 5, 2012

Twitter Novice

I'm pretty late to the Twitter game. I've been a proponent of social learning, have leveraged things like discussion boards and blogs in multiple learning solutions, and have even somewhat enjoyed Facebook (#FB) on a personal level. However, I just started tweeting in earnest a few months ago. I knew I wanted to use it for professional reasons -- follow other people in the professional training and education industry -- but I wasn't sure the best way to go about finding the right people to follow in my feed, or even what the rules are for interaction. I also wanted to see what I could get out of it, educationally.

My first 500 tweets essentially consisted of me either retweeting what others had said, tweeting links of interesting information I read, or participating in chat sessions like #hbrchat or #lrnchat. I'm still not sure what it's called when you participate in one of those hashtag list conversations, but I actually learned a lot each time. I've gained a significant amount of insight from reading articles others have recommended as well. However, I've found that, outside the hashtag conversations, there is a pretty wide lack of interaction in Twitter activity, so working out any idea other than "this is interesting" really hasn't happened with me yet.

Then a couple of days ago I think I committed a foul and disagreed with a tweet I saw. Responding to a tweet about an article (that I read), I sent this tweet:  Central monitoring will not decrease failure. I don't agree that failure rate should be a concern.  Instead of a back/forth I thought might happen, I suddenly felt guilty and quickly backed off my stance by tweeting  ok -- that makes sense. Always good to do . Do agree wth article that it's important to know when to term projects 

I think perhaps I don't have a real relationship with 48 of the people tweeting I see in my feed. So it's difficult to have a meaningful disagreement. So, one question is, how do I build a relationship of trust with others, virtually, so that I might really engage in a discourse using Twitter?

It's also been interesting to see how many people follow me on Twitter. Being a novice, I was surprised when, it seemed overnight, I had 50 followers. I was surprised to see that number drop over the December holidays, possibly because people realized that I'm more of a consumer, less of a contributor. I had noticed that some of the people I follow on Twitter, who seemed to use it to tweet about more professional and academic issues, occassionally tweeted personal items, so I've tried the same. Back to . No more of this silly  and  stuff. I saw that a few people quickly stopped following me after that tweet, as well as this one: Two younger ones have the same  look. Easy to practice with me as their dad 

I'm still also puzzled by those who I see that follow hundreds and sometimes thousands of others. How does one filter through that many tweets to get something they're interested in?

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