What the tweet is going on?, My head is in the clouds & My online presence

So, what’s with the title you ask? Well, lots to talk about this week as I tackle a posting on Twitter and reflect on my trip to Washington, D.C. to attend Blackboard World 2009. (HUGE THANK YOU TO MARY!!!) Follow this link to see some pictures.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news at all lately, you’ll know that Twitter has revolutionized the way that the world learns about news 140 characters at a time. I was fortunate enough to listen to a keynote presentation this morning while attending Blackboard World 2009 in Washington, D.C. by Lester Holt of NBC News. (That's him in the picture.) It was interesting to hear him, a professional and very accomplished journalist talk about how Twitter and other web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing the way that news is reported. Along with the immediacy of the conveyance of information though comes the question of credibility. Anyone can now publish information to the whole world with just a few clicks of a mouse or keystrokes on a cell phone. Just recently, the new iPhone can publish video directly to YouTube and has increased the number of uploads tremendously. Incredible. What used to take a team of professional journalists and millions of dollars of equipment can now be accomplished with a cell phone.

One of the things that I really like about Twitter is that I can follow people who post things that I am interested in like technology, teaching, etc. I can also get help quickly too by posting what I want help with and getting responses from people. BTW - Thanks Sue. I also really like the ability to see what people are ‘tweeting’ about. In fact, I have even added a gadget to my webpage that displays a cloud of the most popular hashtags (the subjects) being used on Twitter. I personally find this fascinating. It allows me to see what people on Twitter are talking about. The recent election in Iran is a prime example of how this can be used and would be really useful in a lot of areas in education.

A powerful tool that anyone interested in using Twitter should investigate is a free piece of software called Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck allows you to organize the plethora of information that is available to you. It also allows you to perform searches on hashtags, manage multiple accounts, organize the people you are following, etc.

So, what do I think of Twitter? Well, for me, I think that I may use Twitter for having a work-related online presence and for following topics that I am interested in related to professional development. My personal web 2.0 tool of choice is Facebook. It does everything that I look for with regards to online social networking with family and friends. My policy regarding students, and I tell them during my first class, is that I use Facebook for my personal life and that I am sure they don’t want to look at pictures of my kids nor do they want to know if I won my chess game against my friend from Halifax. The flipside of that is that I don’t want to know about their personal lives either. I am not interested in which vegetable they are most like, what country they are most suited to living in or how hard they are finding school (yet they publish photos from their weekend escapades). To satisfy students’ desire to have a more personal digital connection with me, I point them to my website by placing a link right in the navigation of my Blackboard course. On my website I have a brief CV, links to my publications, my schedule (updated and sync’d with Outlook and my iPod real-time by Google Calendar…very cool), articles that I share from Google Reader as well as this blog. All things that, though they pertain specifically to me, constitute my professional online presence.