Is Twitter a useful professional development tool?

My answer would be a definite yes!  The usefulness lies in how you use it.  This requires a bit of a learning curve, which I am still on and careful choice of who you follow.

 My journey started by signing up just over 7weeks ago as @hdaze. I was unsure about using my name and making an idiot of myself.  I didn’t put up a photo or profile initially and I just lurked to get a sense of how things worked.

What really got me started was seeing a colleague welcoming and introducing others I knew to her twitter network so I took a deep breath, put my profile and photo up, made contact with @SarahStewart and haven’t looked back since.

Early on I came across the following Youtube clip and started to wonder if twitter wasn’t a self-serving unconnected platform (perhaps it is for some).

But as I started to find good connections to follow I realised that the potential of twitter is fabulous for newbies like me.

Advantages include:

·      so many fantastic links to articles, tools, and ideas that will enhance my own practice.

·      meeting some amazing new people both in NZ and around the world and developing new links and contacts

·      experiencing a real sense of connectivism in relation to my own learning.

Disadvantages include:

·      finding myself starting to think in phrases of 140 characters or less.

·      Trying to restrain myself from feeling the need to follow every link in case I miss out on something.

My useful tips for newbies wanting to use Twitter as a professional development tool include:

·      Link in with someone you know for an introduction to others (made such a difference for me)

·      Take a week or two just to explore.

·      Choose carefully who you want to follow, this can build up slowly.

·      Find useful tools like Tweetdeck or Twitterfox to help manage following tweets once you have a few people to follow. One of the things I like about Tweetdeck is the ability to put people into groups; I can see up to 5 different columns of tweets on screen at one time – this means I can group my favourites together.

·      When you have found someone that you like following, check out who they are following as it can give you good suggestions for your own list.

·      Another way to find people to follow is to use the search tool putting in topics that you are interested in and see what comes up.

·      Experimentation will help you find the people that share information that is of most use to you and that you can feel connected to.

·      Start tweeting before too long – it adds to the sense of connection and you never know what useful tips, hints and connections come from putting yourself out there. This is the next step that I hope to do more of. At the moment I am so busy reading I’m not contributing much back.

 

I enjoy those who tweet a mix of personal with their professional comments as this adds the interpersonal element and helps the connectedness. Getting used to Twitter does take some self-discipline for people like me who love to absorb information but with careful choices it’s a lot of fun and adds so much to my personal learning.

 

Challenges to blogging

Blogging is proving an even greater challenge than I thought. Probably due to my own constraints. I like to have time to think and respond to ideas or develop my own and I often need quiet space to this which is rare and hard to find in my life - even now because I sat down for a few minutes without family around the dog decided it is a perfect opportunity to get my attention!! Hard to type with a dog pawing at my arm and tugging at my guilt strings - yes he deserves attention too.

Anyway upshot of this is that I have found myself spending any spare spaces of time reading  and catching up with others blogs (I have a fantastic google reader database now) rather than putting fingers to the keyboard. So the weeks fly by and of course now I have entered the Twitter world so another new learning curve. This isn't intended as a moan rather an acknowledgement of reality and a challenge to myself to reshape my time to add in reflective learning via this blog. 

Whoops time to finish preparing tea before heading to my dance class - lets see if I can reduce the time before my next blog.

Time to start blogging

I have just had one of those OMG (oh my goodness) moments which is probably as good a place as any to start my blog. One of the courses that I facilitate is Gaining Foundation Skills in Learning and Teaching. I am slowly moving the contents and resources of this course from a closed learning management system to WikiEducator. A great chance for me to improve on what I'm doing.
Whilst reading through comments on a discussion board for the course I came across one that mentioned the learning module on WikiEducator was a little too wordy for the participant's learning style - other discussion threads I was also reading at the time spoke of a revelation I had made in the face-to face workshop that facilitators/teachers don't have to cram huge amounts of content into each session as it doesn't actually increase or improve what is learnt from that session. I suddenly realised (Oh help) that is exactly what I was trying to do with my course on WikiEducator. I saw it as a back up to the face to face facilitation and was trying to provide as much information as possible but I am going about it completely the wrong way.

What I should be doing is using it to create the signposts to learning. Each participant is heading towards the same general destination but the journey should be one that intrigues and entices each of them individually and they don't actually have to follow the same route to reach the destination.
I can still provide lots of info but in a variety of forms that each learner can pick and choose from to best suit their needs.
Time to go back and do a rethink!

I have been procrastinating the beginning of this blog for some time now with mixed feelings about the purpose of blogging. Sometimes it feels as though some people blog to grandstand or make themselves seem important, which just leaves me feeling uncomfortable. My aim is to share some of my thoughts and hopefully insights that I develop along the way as an educator. Some of my words may having meaning for someone else and if anyone engages with my blatherings, then I hope to learn from contributions and discussions.

Anyway - I've started!