MariaD’s blog

Here are some ways I use Twitter for education:

1. Hashtag aggregation for topical conversations at online events, conferences and so on
2. A way to communicate about face-to-face events as they go on, with other attendees, without breaking up the oral presentations flow
3. Ongoing conversations about particular topics with “whoever may tune in” - check out #math for example or #educhat
4. Aggregation of tweets for web sites or blogs using widgets
5. News: all global and most local events are trending, and often you can learn personal information from participants
6. Learning what colleagues are doing, such as events, conferences, projects, meetings, communal documents. Following people I like to their events, which tend to be interesting because these interesting people choose to participate.
7. Quickly publishing my short thoughts before they go away. This promotes creativity, somehow. People should seriously look into the effect.
8. The feeling of being close with colleagues. It’s like living in a small town and bumping into someone at the grocer’s and the drug store and the park. You communicate with the same person on LinkedIn and their blog and then Twitter too, and it strengthens the neighborly feelings.

Here is an excellent presentation by Tom Barrett, or @tombarrett:

And here is a cute cartoon on some of Twitter dangers:

And here is a great blog post on using backchannels, including Twitter, for your events, from TwitTip.

Update: a clever way to use Twitter to support doctoral dissertation writing!