Teaching & Learning in Online Spaces

In July, 2009 the @One organization graciously allowed me to present a webinar titled "All aTwitter about Tweets for Teaching". This series highlights their questions, and my humble attempt at answering their concerns. Q. You can search the internet to research a possible employee. Can Twitter be used to create a personality profile of a possible employee? A. Yes. As with all written and verbal communication, what you say is perceived to be a projection of who you are, and it can work for you or against you. The question is not whether your online activity can be used to evaluate you, but what you are doing to promote your best self online. Let's make a digital imprint that puts you in your best light! Unless your Twitter account is protected, your tweets are there for the world to see. Even if you choose to make your account private at some point, your previous public tweets may still show up in a search for some time. And with services like Tweleted , even your erase...

On Tuesday, July 21, the @One organization graciously allowed me to present a webinar titled "All aTwitter about Tweets for Teaching". This series highlights their questions, and my humble attempt at answering their concerns. Q. What about separate tweets for each course? Is there any way to do that on one account? A. Absolutely! You can do this easily with custom hashtags. You don't have to create a second (or fifteenth) account, or create a shortened URL to a blog or web page, or know any html at all for this. To create an instant hashtag, all you have to do is put the pound sign - # - in front of a word in your tweet (such as #hashtag), and when you post your word will appear in your tweet as a hyperlink. When the reader clicks the hashtag hyperlink, the word is entered into Twitter's search engine and the results appear. Simple! The trick is to create a unique hashtag for each course. For instance, if you teach Art History 1A and there are three sections, you m...

On Tuesday, July 21, the @One organization graciously allowed me to present a webinar titled "All aTwitter about Tweets for Teaching". This series highlights their questions, and my humble attempt at answering their concerns. Q. What are the recommendations regarding following multiple interests e.g. personal, professional [on Twitter]? A. As far as personal and professional interests go, I haven't seen many people who worry about separating those on their personal accounts. Part of what makes humans so interesting is the range and depth of our interests and abilities. I've been able to maintain posts for both education and roller derby in one account so far, and both groups appear to be quite happy (and there is even some crossover interest between the two!) Including your personal interests in your follows & tweets often adds to, rather than distracts from, the conversation. If your account is strictly representing a class, business, or department/division of...

[originally posted on June 9, 2009] There’s a fascinating discussion bubbling up on twitter about two unlikely contenders. Unlikely, because for all intents and purposes they represent the same side of a seemingly endangered entity: print media. On one side, New York Times columnist David Pogue is harnessing the emerging strength of the social media site Twitter to engage his nearly 420,000 microblogging followers in a vast editorial collaboration experiment. Each day, Pogue asks a question of his audience, and the most creative or interesting responses will be included in a future book. On the other side, the Abbeville Press , a small independent publisher with fewer than 500 followers, raised the question of the validity of Pogue’s project in their blog , which contained (by their own admission) some cheap shots, and labeled the project “a triumph of chutzpah”. Pogue casually tweeted the blog URL to his followers, who (myself included) began grumbling in response tweets and defend...