What's all the Twitter about?

Just before classes began this year, I decided to try out Twitter. I’d heard about it for some time, yet kept putting it off. I don’t use my phone for internet/email access, and still don’t (gasp! I know! So outdated!) So I Twitter from the web (using TweetDeck right now – free software, though you can just use Twitter.com). My attitude was quite dismissive about the whole thing. Twitter? Microblogging? Really? So much of what I heard was negative. Yet there seemed to be more and more positive uses of it. At the fall conference of the Ohio Association for Gifted Children, attendees were encouraged to try out Twitter as several organizations in the gifted and education communities were using it. I had the same dismissive attitude toward Facebook before I began using it, and now I love it. I think this is a common initial response in most humans when faced with a new technology: rejection. Do we really need something else? Why? But could I be wrong about Twitter? Was I missing something?

So I jumped in. And it took a while, as most things do, but the more I use Twitter, the more worthwhile it becomes. I have several communities on Twitter : the gifted education community, social media related sites, especially those dealing with education, the library and book lovers community, the Jane Austen fans . My “celebrities” are Mo Willem’s Pigeon (yes, the Pigeon tweets) and halfpintingalls (whose tweets are in the persona of Laura Ingalls Wilder.) There are also a few personal friends, but for the most part my friends are on Facebook, and my colleagues are on Twitter – so Twitter has ended up being the more professional site for me. Quite recently the local school district started tweeting, so I decided to follow them. I was a bit surprised when they decided to follow me! It is always a little surprising, sometimes flattering, sometimes not, when someone decides to follow you. It is a good reminder that your tweets are public. Just like anything else, you need to think before you tweet. You can protect your tweets so that you decide who can follow you, but this doesn’t seem very friendly to me. This did lead me to reflect more and to start a different Twitter account for the educational support group that I’m involved with, which has been good for helping me to organize my interests .
One of the best things about Twitter is that tweets are limited to only 140 characters. Why is this good? You can quite quickly peruse a long list of items and choose those that sound most interesting to explore further. Often there are links to more information/articles, etc. So what good stuff has been tweeted lately? Here is a sampling from the past week of some tweets that seem particularly relevant to libraries and media literacy.

Social Media Best Practices for Libraries: http://ow.ly/1nWmf from Tame the Web: Libraries, Technology and People. This looks like a great blog, bookmarked using Diigo (if you haven’t tried it, I love this bookmarking tool – allows you to highlight and put post-it style notes on webpages: www.diigo.com). This site has many other posts of interests that I want to come back to explore (quickly scanning I see “use social media to connect with teens”, “digital natives”,” the library tweets “ and more.)

How about 9 Great Reasons Teachers Should Use Twitter?

From James Mitchie (. . . a 21st century educator)’s blog, a post on Reading and Twitter: A Crowd-sourced Twitter Discussion about Getting Kids to Read. He writes openly and passionately about his core beliefs in getting high school kids to value reading and proposes the use of the #edread hashtag on Twitter and asks for collaboration on this project. If you want to check in on how it’s going, look here: http://jamesmichie.blogspot.com/p/edread.html

In the New York Times, an article on Reading and the Web, “Texts without Contexts”
I have recently thought of the idea of “cyberbalkanization” but didn’t know what to call it. This article describes it happening when “Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.” I’ve observed it on Facebook – I choose to receive news from NPR, the Christian Science Monitor, and updates from UNICEF, the Children’s Defense Fund, ALA & ALSC. What does my news look like? How about some of my “friends” whose feeds are from Fox News and such? How do the sites we choose to follow, those we select to appear on our news feeds, shape our thinking? How does this shape our view of the world and who we are? Are our choices more limited? What happens to serendipity?

I mentioned Diigo before, and here is what an article I bookmarked this morning, after learning of it on Twitter, looks like:
Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google - Forbes.com
• In addition to learning how to phrase a search query, students need to learn how to protect themselves online, and how to share their work through wikis, videos, and other interactive media. Without a dedicated guide, they end up, in the words of professor Henry Jenkins, as "feral children of the Internet raised by the Web 2.0 wolves."

Feral children of the Internet – wow! Okay librarians, we’re still needed!

Want to give Twitter a try? I'm bkmuse7. Follow me and I'll follow you!