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Monday 28 June 2010

Using Twitter

I have really mixed feelings about Twitter. On the one hand, in a strange way, I am excited by the immediacy of it and I love the idea of building a network of people and sharing ideas. I also feel that there must be a way in which I can use the power of this service in my teaching and for the benefit of my students.

And yet ..... I can't get away from the negative feelings I have about Twitter. Firstly, the overwhelming majority of 'tweets' are at best, banal, and at worst, utter nonsense. Why would anyone be remotely interested in what I am doing? As for using it in my teaching – every example I have seen seems to be of limited value to me and I wonder whether it's really worth the effort.

And yet ..... here I am having played around with it so much over the weekend that I have ended up with three separate Twitter accounts: one for work, one for H800, and personal one. And what's more I've discovered a brilliant tool which allows me to manage all three accounts, plus a Facebook account, plus any searches I want to add. It's called TweetDeck and it's free to download. There's also a version for the iPhone available as a free app. Although it takes a bit of setting up it seems a great way to manage everything from a single place.

Now all I need are some friends to follow and a few ideas for tweets that anyone would be interested in!

......I'm still not convinced, but I'm open to persuasion!

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