Experiences of a Twitter conference
We're going to ask a group of students to use twitter for their reflective practice. The nice thing (in a way), for me is that I am not a very confident twitter user. So rather than assuming this is an easy tool that everyone will pick up and use without any problems, I'm slightly nervous about using it myself!
I attended a twitter conference on Tuesday and Wednesday. (well, you could say it's still going somewhat). This was an enormously enlightening experience. I'm blogging it so that as i get up to speed with Twitter I don't forget my first impressions...
I have a twitter account. I was not sure if it was easy to set up (it was a long time ago), but A was also on it without any problems. Setting up the phone so it was possible to twitter by SMS - a bit of a to and fro but not too difficult.
Getting to grips with the idea of a twitter conference - much less of a comfortable experience. Where WAS it? If there had been a single place that it took place - I would have felt more comfortable but it seemed to be in several places - in Dim Dim to begin with, in Moodle (for the bulk of the pre-existing content and resources), AND in twitter. I was nervous before we started. Getting into Moodle not entirely straightforward.....Getting to Dim Dim was very easy...but if you were late and didn't attend that...it would have been very hard to get up to speed - because that's where things like hash tags were explained. No hashtag, no conference, pretty much.
The discussion - again we came in late and unlike a physical conference, where you sort of know where you are - slip in at the back.....look at people's faces (maybe look at the hand-out on your seat), prehaps look at the notes people are making - how many people are checking their email? OK, you're orientated.....or actually, the twitter conference does not have presentations - the focus is on the questions at the end. So potentially much more interactive which is fantastic.....but hard to just slip into halfway.....
So we enter twitter and what do we find? a huge list of tweets - short snippets - without context it's sometimes hard to decode them - it's not quite like the English I'm used to....and no real thread....answers all over the place.....hard to follow them, they coming thick and fast, by the time you've decoded the first 4 there are another 7 above them. Refresh (takes blimmin ages), and then there are even more that have yet to appear - another refresh. It's quite draining.
A great thing - I booked a couple of days before - i knew Tues and Wed were busy but i thought I could squeeze it in.....so I could still attend - that wouldn't have happened if i had to be "away" for 2 days. At the same time, I was NOT able to do 2 things at the same time as I had expected. I did not find it possible to attend a twitter conference imbetween my work. I was either engaged with the conference or I was working. the first morning I was "at the conference" the afternoon I got around to going through all my emails and discovered lots of urgent work. The next day I just worked. I didn't get a chance to visit the twitter conference once. I was only aware of it going on in the background because I kept receiving notifications in my email....I could not close off work. These are all acknowledged issues with any training or engagement that takes place at your everyday desk. Nothing new here, but it really brought it home.
what I was also aware of however was how utterly immediate it was. There was not a moment when I was not replying or reading a response or thinking of what to say next. I felt as if I was totally involved (when I WAS involved at all). The immediacy is impressive. Also it is so fast that I felt much freer to just say something - it was there and then it was gone. It didn't matter if it wasn't too deep.
and it's still going - plus I feel that there is now an accessible CoP, as opposed to a number of disparate attendees, a pile of business cards and lots of separate emails to send. Even if a conference sets up a social network like Bing, somehow that is still a closed off network....you can't then just dash something off to someone else. Twitter feels very interconnected in that sense - you get a sense of flow of ideas, from one to the other and back again....many different voices on many different subjects.....but you have to learn to go with the flow....and distraction is absolutely inevitable...almost part of the process...
OK, I'll write more as and when i remember it...