Mashable write up of our Twitter article: Alan Cann, Jo Badge, Stuart Johnson, Alex Moseley. Twittering the student experience. ALT-N, Vol. 17, October 2009. http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/xrctg5ovlfkimsphpsy77s
I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices... As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it's not broadly popular. My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan's friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become "public" (to all that matter) simply because there's social pressure to connect to "everyone"?
While an individual user may use Twitter primarily as a conversational tool or a broadcast medium, in its totality, Twitter operates a lot like a wiki: as a knowledge-sharing, co-creation platform that produces content and allows its consumption. Conversation is perhaps the most simple and obvious form of collaboration, but would anyone claim that Wikipedia is a conversational platform? Despite the presence of information sharing, co-creation of an end product, and even discussion pages, Wikipedians on the whole aren't having conversations. According to this argument, Twitter is no more a conversational platform than Wikipedia is.
Publish full articles without needing a blog or site. There's no setup or login. Just write your text and Write4net will publish it using your Twitter account.
WordTwit is a plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Twitter account as a tweet, using the blog domain as a short URL.
EDUCAUSE Quarterly Magazine, Volume 32, Number 1, 2009 By Elizabeth J. Aspden and Louise P. Thorpe Learning environment development has been a key part of the Academic Innovation Team’s remit for a number of years at Sheffield Hallam University (see About Us). Beginning with our research into the impact of e-learning on the student experience in 2002 — and recognizing the way e-learning influenced students’ views of physical spaces — we started to look more closely at the ways in which our students and faculty use on-campus spaces, and at ways in which our environments needed to evolve. A recurring theme that emerged was the importance of serendipitous meetings and the ad hoc use of those "in between" times: in between taught sessions, in between focused study, in between study and home.
Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them in the stream without having to click through links.
While Twitter has been less than forthcoming on how they plan to monetize their service, there is no shortage of ideas from third parties on ways to get paid for spending time with Twitter.
Year on year visits to Twitter are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.
In the short time that I have used it, Twitter has grown quickly to play a major part in the way that I interact with fellow colleagues and professionals from around the world.