Journal 2: Twitter

Ferguson, H. (2010). Join the flock. International Society for Technology in Education, 37(8), Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/issues/Join_the_Flock.aspx
http://www.iste.org/Libraries/Leading_and_Learning_Docs/June_July_2010_Join_the_Flock.sflb.ashx

SUMMARY


Join the Flock:

This article discussed creating your PLN, professional learning network, through Twitter. The author Hadley Ferguson mentioned that through the use of our PLN, we can alleviate the stress of researching on your own. We can now gather information from our colleagues, experts, friends, community, etc. Our PLN “is a community of individuals around the world who are learning together.”

She stresses that in order to success we must commit to the PLN community. By using the analogy of how we make new friends by deciding to either just say hello or to pause and have a conversation, we get a better understanding of the simple ways we can build our community.

The author states some simple steps to the process of utilizing Twitter. First, we set up our account with our bio and a photo. Then we learn to follow other people by just simply clicking “Follow”. When selecting those we want to follow we can choose individuals we want to learn from as well as those we share common interests with. Once we are following the process is simple and we can decide from there how actively we want to participate. Tweets will begin to populate our stream and we can either just lurk in the background or begin to gain exposure by retweeting something of interest and begin creating our own tweets. It is networking and if we start to create our PLN conversations, retweet, tweet, etc. then we will gain followers and create relationships. We can ask questions and receive extremely valuable feedback. By using hash tags, such as #teacher or #education, we will gain more exposure.

Enhance your Twitter Experience:

The author began her article by stating the wonderful connections she made because of twitter and the opportunities that presented themselves such as international connections. Through the use of a Twitter organizer such as a tweet deck you can organize your streams into lists. I am going to definitely put this to use because as of now Twitter just seems a little messy to me. She listed common twitter terminology like hash tag: discussion stream aggregating tweets on a given topic or a mistweet: to accidentally send a tweet to the wrong person or through the wrong Twitter account.

Q1- How can I get my point across or question answered in only 140 characters?

It can be difficult to do so at times therefore most of the time you can create a link to a site that further explains your question or answer in detail.

Q2- What is the purpose of a hashtag?

A hashtag is necessary to connect to specific communities. For example, in class if we tweet beginning with #422 it will be aggregated to other tweets with the topic and easily searchable.