Has Twitter changed the way you communicate?

I wasn't amongst the early adopters of Twitter, and I had seen it demonstrated as a "back channel" at a couple of conferences before I finally tried it out.

An article in Tuesday's Sydney Morning Herald starts

Dismissed as a joke when it began five years ago this week, Twitter has revolutionised the way we communicate.

This morning when I wanted to send a friend a birthday greeting, I did it on Twitter.

As part of the work I do at Education Services Australia I tweet as findingmyfuture. Three times a week I send out messages about careers, about 10 messages a week. I follow 58 other "careers" tweeters, and nearly 100 follow my tweets. It is proving an effective way of delivering our messages about myfuture, and the resources that students, teachers, and parents can find there. 

Creating short pithy messages can be a bit of a challenge, it really makes you think about what you want to get across.
I add the hashtage #myfuture to each of the messages to help people find them.

I follow the tweets through TweetDeck, which works like an aggregator, where you can create "search" columns to follow particular hashtags.
I also use TweetDeck to re-tweet my #myfuture messages to the community that follows me in my "educational" Twitter identity of smik09. Actually the 09 indicates when I created this particular Twitter account, so I guess I could be seen as a bit of a veteran.
One of the early criticisms of Twitter was that so many signed up and then dropped off active tweeting within days.

In fact I created a Prezi about 12 months ago that asked Is Twitter in Trouble?

Is Twitter in Trouble? on Prezi

 

The other thing I've done is use my Twitter followers list to create a "Daily" newspaper that can be delivered to subscribers by email. This uses a free tool at Paper.li

The myfuture Daily gives a daily summary of the tweets in the previous 24 hours by findingmyfuture  and those that we follow .

I also created The Kerrie Smith Daily which is based on tweets by smik09 and the 224 people I follow in that persona.

Just a note: one of the things that I learnt to do early was to separate my personas.  I blog on educational matters about 3 times a week, and I blog about crime fiction daily. I had originally thought that I could use the same persona in both communities, but I soon learnt there is little overlap and merging both communities in my twitter account just muddied the waters.

So just as I have a personal email address, and a work/educational email address, so I have 2 different Twitter accounts, and 2 differently purposed blogs.

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Twitter is for old people!

I have again got some anecdotal "evidence" as a result of discussion of yesterday's post.
It appears that, while teenagers are hooked on FaceBook and texting on their mobiles, they are less than impressed with Twitter.
This appears to be a fairly typical response (this by a 13 year old female)

daughter: Dad, only OLD people use Twitter.
Me: But it's used by lots of the celebrities that you follow - Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, some of those Gleek kids...
daughter: (rolls her eyes dramatically) Da-ad, you only use Twitter instead of Facebook because it is simple. Like the smoke signals you used to send from cave to cave when you were young.

and another

My own 15 yo daughter thinks Twitter is embarrassingly stupid.  I handed her my phone the other day as I was driving and dictated a message for her to send... it was only afterwards when she realised it was Twitter that she said "Eww, I used Twitter?!"  :-)

This time the ancedotes are supported by research.

• This report dated September 2009: Only around 15% of all the Twitter users are less than 25 years old, who would know? An official report from Morgan Stanley says that teenagers just don’t use Twitter.... people under 25 years are the main Internet users, only this group of people takes the 25% of all population; but they also just represent 16% of all Twitter. more
• In December 2010 a Pew Internet report said "Eight percent of the American adults who use the internet are Twitter users. It is an online activity that is particularly popular with young adults, minorities, and those who live in cities."
• In a post Teens Don't Tweet in mid 2009 Nielsen estimated that 64% of Twitter growth had come from the 24 to 55 year old age range

So, it may be that if you are hoping to sell Twitter to a bunch of teenagers in the classroom, that you've already lost the battle, just when you've found a technology that you like.

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Twittering in Education

This is an old web posting: http://www.emergingedtech.com/2010/02/100-ways-to-teach-with-twitter/

But it raises an interesting issue and your chance to correct me.

My impression is that, in Australian schools at least, Twitter, for a variety of reasons, gets minimal use.
Am I right?
By and with students that is, but a different scenario exists with teachers.

Do you Tweet?

Jane Knight lists it as a key tool for professionals
http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2010/02/twitter-and-facebook-and-buzz-oh-my-fb.html
http://c4lpt.co.uk/140Learning/twitter.html Publish
It came out as #1 in her Top 100 tools for Learning in 2010 (and it was #1 in 2009 too)
http://c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100-2010.html
It still looks like #1 so far on her 2011 list
http://c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/2011.html

Twitter apparently grew hugely in 2010

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/stocking-stuffer.html

In the past 12 months, Twitter users sent an astonishing 25 billion Tweets and we added more than 100 million new registered accounts.

http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/twitter-stats-2010/

If you have time to look
http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2010/12/100-most-popular-twitter-apps.html

Where I tweet

• http://twitter.com/#!/@findingmyfuture
• http://twitter.com/#!/@smik09
• http://twitter.com/#!/@smiksa

I found it necessary, even essential, to separate my work and personal personas.
I would describe myself as an occasional tweeter.
I have set things up so that my blog postings automatically get posted into the appropriate Twitter account.

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10 second grabs and 140 characters

There's an interesting re-surfacing of the debate about whether going digital is making us dumber, or at the very least reducing our concentration span, making us cyber butterflies.

On one of my blogs I monitor what visitors do when they arrive. Many alight on a post from a Google search, and then, less than a minute later, they have departed on a link they have found on my blog. I've never thought of that in the light of reduced attention span. I've always thought it was a sign that they had found what they were looking for. Google Analytics tells me that even on this blog, the average visitor spend only 1:03 minutes before they bounce off somewhere else. Can they, I ask, get the meaning of my post in that time?

Critics of Twitter, who are invariably not persisent users, deride the fact that tweets have a 140 character limit. After all, what of import can you say in such a short space? They obviously don't understand the lengths you have to go to in reducing your message to the 140 character limit and yet still get your meaning across. Most of us can read 140 characters in 10 seconds or less.

In a recent article in The Age, How the internet makes us stupid, Nicholas Carr writes "A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the net, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers."  He's writing a new book The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, and he says he was stimulated to write the book after realising his own capacity to focus and concentrate was changing. He attributes it to some sort of internet addiction. [Factors like advancing age, eyesight, and pressures of work crop up in my mind.]

Of course there are those who object strongly to this point of view. Computer World echoes "Digital Doesn't mean Dumb. It’s a myth that we have all become Twitter-brained visual grazers with no appetite for prose."
PC Advisor makes a similar point, claiming that  It’s a myth that we have all become Twitter-brained visual grazers with no appetite for prose. I’m with comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who said: “There is no such thing as an attention span. People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them.”  The article goes on to claim that good digital design helps us locate what we want to know more quickly.

It all reminds me a bit of the debate between the skim-readers and the rest. Those of us who can't skim-read a book for any length of time claim that those who do must miss a lot of meaning and nuance.

I'm more inclined to think that the pressures we are under to cope with information overload, and at the same time appear to be on top of it all, means that we have to be able to flit like cyber butterflies. The important this is to be able to recognise the good oil when we've found it, and to be able to think deeply about the issues.

That's why information literacy is so critical in education, more than ever before. Our students have to be taught to skim, to recognise, to select, and then dwell when needed.

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