Lucy’s Blog

Being a good girl in my SMIELT class

Tweeting

February 1, 2008 at 12:26 pm · Filed under SMiELT, evo and tagged: , , , ,

Tweeting around on twitter, not quite sure what to do with it.  Looks like you just connect up with existing friends. Asked about finding like-minded people, but have no answers so far as I’ve only got 6 followers. Need to start following you lot but I bet you’ll all just be doing SMiELT homework.

Watched the timeline for a while, mostly pretty mundane conversations, should I start to follow someone randomly?  Saw a mildly erotic tweet “Inspecting the hair on the back of a hand, wondering what that hand would feel like on my skin.” and started following that twitterer, problem is, there seems nowhere to flag content or users as inappropriate for students.  Would we need a filter to use this with a class? If so, would it only filter rude words?  Or would we just avoid the public timeline?  The other thing about the public timeline is that all languages congregate there.

Twitter is perfect for the present continuous though!

I let Alicia Rey introduce me to Pownce where you can use more than the tweety 140 characters.  It also lets you embed photos and videos (but that could be even more problematic if there is no filter) . I don’t feel up to participating in Pownce properly yet, I’m spreading myself too thinly.

Lucy

6 Comments »

  susant wrote @ February 1, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Hi Lucy, censor, keep 2 identities one for professional and one for personal. Don’t put your photo on the personal – students could find it. Also protect your twitter updates.

I write this after discovering that some of my info ie: username, photo and posts had been hijacked and fed into a dating site -

  illyasoet wrote @ February 2, 2008 at 5:43 pm

This is all pioneer work we’re doing! I’m also trying to grasp the usefulness of twitter, and with success. IF you are in a network, you can let people know that you need help, comments (like in BlogED08 http://twitter.com/BlogEd08
and also inform your network of what’s going on.

I suggest looking at who is on the list of people you are following . Invite friends and family to twitter too. I’m looking forward to your evaluation of this tool once you’ve used it a bit.

  Lucy wrote @ February 3, 2008 at 3:39 pm

The dual identity sounds like a good idea. Scary that they put you on a dating site!

  anne wrote @ February 4, 2008 at 7:12 pm

how can you keep up the dual identity bit? if you’re a professional like i am in adult education/training, you’re out there marketing your real name and your real self with real contact details. i wouldn’t know how to protect a *personal-private* from a *personal-trainer* identity except by simply not putting private things out under my public and real name..

  anne wrote @ February 4, 2008 at 7:39 pm

sorry, am i getting this right – if you’re on twitter anyone can see anything you write and you can#t use closed groups?

  Patricia Glogowski wrote @ February 8, 2008 at 5:47 pm

There are potentials to Twitter, but I agree there are some problems with it. As you say, “Watched the timeline for a while, mostly pretty mundane conversations…” I am not really interested in what people had for breakfast or who they are drinking beer at the moment. I think the best solution is, as Illya stated above, to find like-minded people and, my suggestion, to stay focused: I twitter about my teaching and professional development and not about the coffee I am drinking at the moment…

Also, I wouldn’t jump onto using it with your students yet; I think we are still exploring the possibilities here; I haven’t heard about any pedagogically sound examples of using Twitter with students.


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