Lots of chatter on the t’interweb around the world is carried via Twitter. It’s a “micro-blogging tool”, which might not make any sense to you either! Basically, it’s sending very short updates from your computer, the web or your phone to share info, news or feelings with other people, privately or publicly.
The reason we’re telling you? We think you can find a use for it! E@T use twitter to keep a short news feed available in Blackboard, on the web and to anyone who subscribes to our feed (see just over to the right of this page). The University push out short updates too. Twitter is becoming increasingly common at conferences, providing a live ‘backchannel’ which comments on, asks questions and shares knowledge and discussion amongst attendees before, during and after the event. Could you see this happening in lectures?
Our good friend Andy Ramsden who visited for a very successful E@T Lunch on blogs and podcasting a couple of years ago has pulled some info together at the University of Bath which is a good overview of using twitter, and Alex Moseley at Leicester University sums up some good uses here too.
There’s a great info video about Twitter which also appears on the Twitter help page (lots of basic explanations of the ‘jargon’ you pick up on the help page too)
Here’s a less techie view of how Twitter works:
Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.
Or why don’t you come along to the workshop that will run in CLQE on Monday 2nd November, in M701B? There are lots of uses for Twitter, so if you’re interested in capturing the student experience on your course, encouraging students to share feelings/frustrations/successes whilst on placement or brave enough to get them to maintain a feedback stream on your module 😕 , sign up to clqe-workshops and come along! If you do already Twitter (and we know plenty of people around campus do!) and have some ideas for using it from the start of term, get in touch straight away.