Using tweet-chats for Learning (about learning)

Twitter is a useful tool for learning in so many ways. One of the newest ways to use twitter is via tweet-chats, and they seem be a growing phenomena. Typically tweet chats have the same format: a designated time and topic and a host who may be an expert in the area who sets questions and adds to the conversation. Participants answer each question labelled A1, A2 etc and then discussions flourish from there. One of the draws of tweet-chats is that they change what are normally asychronous interactions into synchronous ones- that is you get to interact, in real time with a lot of like-minded people.







For the last few weeks I've taken part in the Learning and Teaching in Higher Education chats (#LTHEchat) – Wednesday 8pm-9pm UK time. Here are some thoughts on their use for CPD and learning in general.








Advantages:

• It's a great way to connect to people in your area of work
• It's a great way to build up a PLN (personal learning network)
• More than simply individual connections, tweet-chats create a community of practice
• It's synchronous, so you get a real feeling of connection with your fellow tweeters.
• You come across new ideas and new ways of thinking – (and your own ideas may be questioned).
• Having to express yourself in 140 characters forces you to synthesise your ideas and to be precise about what you want to say.
• It's easy to link to other sources – such as websites, blog posts or papers

Disadvantages:

• It's often very fast paced – and hard to keep up with the conversation
• Limited to the length of a tweet (140 characters) means that it can be tricky to express your thoughts
• Often the depth of discussion is limited – both because of the pace of the conversation and the character limit- but think of this as the start of a discussion, not the end. Continue off line or in blog posts

Tricks:

Everyone has their own tricks to making the chat as efficient as possible. I prefer to use twitter from a web browser on a PC. I follow the hasttag (LTHCchat in this case). This means I can see all new tweets, and easily scroll up and down the list.  All tweets that are replies (as opposed to a new tweet) also have the option of 'view conversation' so it is easy to see how a particular thread developed.

The most useful feature is that notifications appear on the bottom right hand side of the screen, which means you can favourite, re-tweet or reply directly to them without having to change tabs.

I also copy the hasttag (e.g.#LTCHchat) in the clipboard, so I only have to do ctrl V at the end of every tweet to make sure it will be seen by the tweet-chat participants. I'm sure it also helps that I can touch type!

Further reading:

From the journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice: Theorising Twitter Chat

I would love to hear what tricks others use!

The next one is on Internationalisation with Steven Peters @SPAappliedling see you there!

Using tweet-chats for Learning (about learning) by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.