Twitter & HEDr Simon J. Lancaster

Tweet including #BIOLT13

@S_J_Lancaster: Tweeting

“Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page.” Wikipedia,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter, accessed 1/5/2011.

Reasons to Tweet:1. To keep in touch with the subject / education

community.2. To facilitate your life.3. To provide a novel and very immediate means

of communication with students over a particular topic or module.

@CHE2C32: Supporting a Module

Example tweets from @CHE2C32 :Please remember to put #CHE2C32 in your tweet if

you want it to feature in the lecture. @CHE2C32 just addresses it to me its not the search term.

"Super-toxic" dimethylmercury is this week's Chemistry in its element #podcast subject. Careful now! http://bit.ly/cHswSp

Example tweets from followers (students):@CHE2C32 made some great black shiny crystals

today :D@CHE2C32 Tutorial work and dolly mixtures -

happy times :)@CHE2C32 is in the house and my experiment

chooses this time to start going wrong. Thank you God.

Science and Education @NatureChemistry Nature Chemistry “RT @CHE2C32: Just writing a short talk for #VCE2011 on using Twitter in Chemistry. Any comments gratefully received.”

@TwitterBulletin News, Status & T“Twitter as a Teaching & Learning Tool http://bit.ly/nu6CMN“

@ChemConnector ChemConnector“John Cleese does chemistry : sciencebase.com/science-blog/j…”

@ACSpressroom Michael Woods“Scientists find crystals that may have formed in the primordial cloud that produced the sun and planets bit.ly/rqAZOk”

@GradeGuru GradeGuru“Will a Harvard Professor's New Technology Make College Lectures a Thing of the Past? http://ow.ly/5Uhdj @good #highered #edtech”

Twitter Polling

Widgets

Tweetbeam There are many (web) apps designed to project a real-time Twitter-feed.

Twitwheel Twitwheel is a highly visual way to see who is part of a discussion.

StorifyHow do we combat the transient nature of the Twitter feed and make a lasting record?

Achieve a critical mass• Follow the tweeps in this list:https://twitter.com/S_J_Lancaster/education

• Use an avatar (to replace the egg).• Retweet freely.

• GlossaryTweep – someone who tweetstweetup – physical meeting of tweetersRT – retweetMT – modified tweet#ff – follow Friday

Conclusions• Twitter is incredibly powerful.• More information then we could ever process.• The potential for exponential dissemination.

• Twitter is a public forum and should be treated as such.

• Using it as non-compulsory addition to modules requires considerable perseverance and creativity.

• For an academic its strongest suites are personal and professional development and networking.

• Twitter incorporation does not need to be exclusive.• Tools exist to present and archive tweets.