Journal 2: Join the Flock and Enhance Your Twitter Experience

Ferguson, H. (2010). Join the flock. Learning and Leading with Technology, 37(8), Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/issues/Join_the_Flock.aspx

In "Join the Flock," Ferguson outlines many educational tools for the use of the social networking site, Twitter. She explains that a PLN (Personal Learning Network) on Twitter can be beneficial to educators for sharing and learning from each other. She then explains how to set up a Twitter account, and that you can do many awesome things with it, like follow people who have the same interests as you, or enter into a specific topic chat by use of the # key. She also outlines Twitter vocabulary that one can use when starting Twitter. For example:

• Twaffic: Traffic on Twitter.
• Tweeple: Twitter users.
• Tweeps: Your PLN followers.

These are just a few Twitter terms that she outlined, but she also gave definitions to more important things like how to follow someone on Twitter, how to microblog, and how to reweet something that someone has already posted. She explains that Twitter may be overwhelming at first, especially to non-social networking site users, but gives confidence that anyone can use Twitter effectively with enough time and patience.

How can you know that you will be getting strictly educational information? Aren't there a lot of personal tweets that get in the way?

Ferguson explains that there are many kinds of tweets that people tweet on Twitter. She proposes that to avoid mixing personal tweets with work related educational tweets, one should make many different usernames on Twitter, so that they can have separate accounts for different purposes. One can also avoid mixing the two by being selective in the people they follow and the chats they participate in.

Twitter seems to be very new age, and is only limited to 140 characters a tweet, is it really that effective?

Because Twitter is limited to 140 characters, it helps people get their information faster. There isn't long descriptions or essays that one has to filter through to get what they want. The point of Twitter is to get and share information fast, and the more effective Tweets are those that give out links to learning modules or information that one wants to share. It's a tool that is used for quickly getting and sharing information, and 140 characters is just enough space to do so. One can also do multiple tweets if their first tweet wasn't good enough too!