What the Tweet?

Exchange is creation. --Muriel Rukeyser

When I asked my sister what a hashtag was, she said she thought it had something to do with Charlie Sheen. I understand her confusion on the topic; up until a couple months ago, I would have thought it had something to do with breakfast.

My professors in the Teacher-Librarian program strongly encouraged us to use Twitter to build personal learning networks. Will Richardson (2010) writes that Twitter is a "powerful professional development and communications tool" that has become a "running river of conversation and ideas" (p. 86). So, I resurrected my long-ago abandoned Twitter account, downloaded TweetDeck and started learning about Twitter in earnest. At first, I added a short list of recommended people to follow, and this got me up and started. But, it wasn't until I started following hashtags that I really started to understand how Twitter can connect you with a broad base of enthusiastic and tech savvy educators.

A hashtag is basically a way to search and label tweets according to topic. By using hashtags, you don't need to find who to follow first. Instead, you can follow the hashtag stream, and occasionally select tweeters to follow whose interests match your own. Here is an article that I found useful in terms of understanding and finding education hashtags to follow. The hashtags I am regularly checking are: #edchat, #edtech, #engchat and, of course, #tldl and #edes501.

Needless to say, to really get the most out of Twitter, you need to start doing some of your own tweeting, not just following others. In the past few weeks, I have taken the plunge. At first, I tentatively tweeted messages to people in my course, then I added hashtags to my tweets and, this week, I started tweeting out links to my blog posts using hashtags. This morning when I looked in my Direct Mention column in TweetDeck, I saw that my blog link tweets had been retweeted several times by twitter-ites in the twitter-verse. Wow! I'm sharing ideas with teachers all over the world - one retweet even came from Burundi. A new sense of collegiality is forming and it's being powered by Web 2.0.

References

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousands Oaks, CA: Corwin.

The A-Z Dictionary of Educational Twitter Hashtags. Edudemic. Retrieved from http://edudemic.com/2011/10/twitter-hashtag-dictionary/