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Twitter: A Tool for Academia to Connect, Share, and Grow Relationships Twitter: A Tool for Academia to Connect, Share, and Grow Relationships John LeMasney Digital Media Convergence COMM 563 SP09 Introduction Twitter allows individuals to send out messages to followers as well as the public about any topic, without editing, complete with what a power user of the system named Andrew Korf calls "ambient intimacy" or "to follow or be somewhat intimate with people without needing to directly engage them" (Salas, 2009). It is a very direct way to broadcast, relatively easy to do (comparative even to blogs), and allows for an asynchronous audience and interaction (Siegel, 2007). It allows for the following of others in the thousands and the ability to be followed by thousands (Johnson-Elie, 2009). As a result, it has the potential for greatness as a mass communication tool, as well as a one-to-one communication, often simultaneously (Johnson-Elie, 2009). While it was first envisioned as a fun way to keep in touch with friends, its ability to meet much more serious needs is being quickly realized (Shropshire, 2009; Antlfinger, 2009). Given the right context, training, and support, it can transform the ways that organizations, businesses, and communities communicate (Robinson, 2009; Ferak, 2009; Antlfinger, 2009). I'll demonstrate in this paper that Twitter is a yet-undiscovered powerful communication tool for academic staff, faculty and students to connect, share, and grow relationships.

Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive Alfred Hermida by Alfred Hermida, April 13, 2009 Tagged: coveritlive, journalism school, social media, twitter, university of british columbia Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front of the class and talks at them for the best part of an hour. In this instructor-centered model, knowledge is a commodity to be transmitted from the instructor to the student's empty vessel. There is a place for the traditional, one-to-many transmission. This is the way the mass media worked for much of the 20th century and continues to operate today. But the emergence of participatory journalism is changing this. Most news outlets, at the very least, solicit comments from their online readers. Others, such as Canada's Globe and Mail, use the live-blogging tool CoveritLive both for real-time reporting and for engaging readers in a discussion, such as in its coverage of the Mesh conference in Toronto. Tools such as CoveritLive or Twitter can turn the one-to-many model of journalism on its head, offering instead a many-to-many experience. The same tools may also have a use in the classroom, as a way of turning the traditional university lecture into a conversation.

Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of "Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG. It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade. But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.

Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of "Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG. It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade. But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.

"The Personal Learning Environment concept is relatively new and is often used interchangeably with Personal Learning Network. The earliest reference is attributed to George Siemens in his 2004 paper, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Downes and Attwell have also popularised the concept with Downes describing the PLE as "a tool that allows for a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources" (2006, p23). Semantically, a personal learning environment and a personal learning network differ, with a network referring to connections and the interaction between them, and an environment referring to a broader definition that includes more passive tools and settings. The network and its broader socially constructed environment are interdependent, constantly shaping each other and unable to be separated."

"Bernard Woods (Goss Gilroy Inc.) and I have developed a Methodology to provide a variety of stakeholders with a roadmap in addition to rigorous methods and tools for specifying and evaluating learning, training and development (LT&D). The Methodology gives senior managers, learning, training and development professionals, professional evaluators and similar stakeholders what they need to make a convincing case to senior management about improvements in work performance and organizational results. The Methodology is not positioned to replace other techniques and methods, but to complement them. We are trying to provide a more formal way for people to understand their business/work problems at a systemic level, assess if learning, training and development (LT&D) is useful for solving them and if so, provide a minimalist set of tools for evaluating LT&D initiatives that enable drawing a line of sight to organizational results. "

"With each new wave of technological innovation, the traditional way to explore the evolution of the educational model is to focus on how to best integrate the new technology into the learning process without influencing the traditional pedagogical principles and policies imposed by formal educational institutions. Recently, with the rise of new Web 2.0 tools and services (e.g. blogs, wikis, RSS, mashups, social tagging), many researchers are going the same way by exploring how to best include these tools into the traditional academic and corporate learning process. I believe however that in doing so, educational Web 2.0 technologies will go the way of previous technologies (e.g. LMS, LCMS, CMS, LO, LOR); i.e. much hype followed by a slow death. "

"You have probably noticed that Twitter is more popular than ever. As small business owners and solopreneurs we know how beneficial social media can be but are often overwhelmed at the thought of managing it all. If you are looking to take advantage of Twitter in your business without it taking over your life, here are some great "shortcut" tools and applications to keep you in the social media game without sacrificing all of your precious time!"

"The Best Collaboration Tools"

example of blog based course

Purpose of the Experience Innovation continues to occur on the internet at an extremely lively pace. What was once the realm of email, FTP, Gopher, and the Web is barely recognizable a mere 10 years later. Keeping up with the speed of innovation and maintaining a familiarity with the most recent tools and capabilities is handy in some professions and absolutely critical in others. This course is designed to help you understand and effectively use a variety of "web 2.0″ technologies including blogs, RSS, wikis, social bookmarking tools, photo sharing tools, mapping tools, audio and video podcasts, and screencasts.

How to Use Twitter as a Twool iStock_000000372006XSmall.jpg I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a tool-specifically as a marketing tool-for my website Alltop and my book, Reality Check. If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn't, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.

Marking with Voice tools December 14, 2008 by Terry Anderson I have nearly completed this term's paper and report marking using Adobe Acrobat to add voice comments and annotations. In a word, the results are terrific!! First, it saved me time. I am not a fast typer and using voice, meant I didn't even have to spell check!! My comments were much longer than text annotations and I was able to give examples, suggestions etc. that I could have done in text, but likely would not have due to time constraints.

Yesterday, I facilitated a session called Mapping Social Media to Strategy. Here's the description: The session will share an overview of why the sequence listen, learn, and adapt is critical to implementing a successful social media strategy. We'll take a look at how to use both qualitative and hard data points to refine and adapt your strategy as well as the role of continuous listening and learning through implementation of pilots. We'll examine what can and can't be quantified as well as various metrics and analytics tools. All this will be shared through a lively mix of discussion and case studies. Takeaways: 1. How to listen to improve the results of your social media strategy implementation 2. An understanding of the right metrics to use and how/when to incorporate qualitative information 3. An introduction to analytic tools and individual/team reflection processes

SmartPen as Digital Ethnography Tool Mar 11th, 2009 by Prof Wesch This little smartpen from livescribe just might revolutionize my note-taking in seminars, discussions, and ethnographic interviews. If you have never seen it before, check out some of the demos on YouTube. In short, it records audio as you write and links what you are writing to the audio (by recording what you write through a small infrared camera near the tip of the pen). When you are done recording you can actually tap the pen anywhere on your page and the pen will play the audio that was recorded at the time you were making that specific pen stroke. Students are already sharing lecture notes in the community section of livescribe.com. As recording devices become increasingly embedded into everyday objects the days of protecting lectures from being recorded seem numbered.

combinedlogo3.jpgWelcome to the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit Join the ICT-KM Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the KM4Dev Community in creating and growing this resource of knowledge sharing tools and methods. While these are applicable in a wide range of contexts, we hope that together we can help frame them in the context of international development with a focus on agriculture, fisheries, food and nutrition, forestry and sustainable development.

combinedlogo3.jpgWelcome to the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit Join the ICT-KM Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the KM4Dev Community in creating and growing this resource of knowledge sharing tools and methods. While these are applicable in a wide range of contexts, we hope that together we can help frame them in the context of international development with a focus on agriculture, fisheries, food and nutrition, forestry and sustainable development.

In March 1987, the AAHE Bulletin first published "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." With support from Lilly Endowment, that document was followed by a Seven Principles Faculty Inventory and an Institutional Inventory (Johnson Foundation, 1989) and by a Student Inventory (1990). The Principles, created by Art Chickering and Zelda Gamson with help from higher education colleagues, AAHE, and the Education Commission of the States, with support from the Johnson Foundation, distilled findings from decades of research on the undergraduate experience. Several hundred thousand copies of the Principles and Inventories have been distributed on two- and four-year campuses in the United States and Canada. (Copies are available at cost from the Seven Principles Resource Center, Winona State University, PO Box 5838, Winona, MN 55987-5838; ph 507/457-5020.) - Eds. Since the Seven Principles of Good Practice were created in 1987, new communication and information technologies have become major resources for teaching and learning in higher education. If the power of the new technologies is to be fully realized, they should be employed in ways consistent with the Seven Principles. Such technologies are tools with multiple capabilities; it is misleading to make assertions like "Microcomputers will empower students" because that is only one way in which computers might be used. Any given instructional strategy can be supported by a number of contrasting technologies (old and new), just as any given technology might support different instructional strategies. But for any given instructional strategy, some technologies are better than others: Better to turn a screw with a screwdriver than a hammer - a dime may also do the trick, but a screwdriver is usually better. This essay, then, describes some of the most cost-effective and appropriate ways to use computers, video, and telecommunications technologies to advance the Seven Principles.

"Google Wave has been much discussed and speculated about since it was first announced just over one year ago. Many in the business community have wondered how it can be used for marketing and sales. Others have wondered how it will be integrated into daily communication and collaboration. Still others who lack the patience to test a tool with more than a few layers have wondered just what it is. Google developed the product as an answer to the question what would email look like if it were invented today rather than 40 years ago? (Trapani)"

Teaching/Learning Activities What do you want to use technology for? To help you answer this question, we've outlined some teaching/learning activities below that are used across the disciplines and tried to suggest through examples from the Web how each might utilize a certain kind of technology or a combination of different technologies to accomplish specific learning objectives. Each example represents a different discipline, and there are over 40 disciplines represented in the examples. Each example is associated with one or more interactive tool, and information about each kind of technology-what it is and how to use it-appears in the technologies section.

"I think of PLEs as Operating Systems just like regular operating systems are for computer users. In fact, I call the PLE a LearnOS. Thinking of a PLE as a LearnOS helps me also get by the initial comprehension of what it can contain, such as tools, resources and connections, as also how it is deployed - PC, mobile and cloud. I can then move on to think about how learning will occur in this LearnOS by asking not only how the LearnOS can be organized to support my learning (feed aggregation, twitter tags and the like) in a given context, or how my LearnOS is connected to other LearnOS-es out there (PLNs), but also to thinking how my LearnOS can adapt to my learning contexts and my learning needs."

Social Media Classroom Invitation to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It's all free, as in both "freedom of speech" and "almost totally free beer." We invite you to build on what we've started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we'll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes-integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don't want to install your own. (See this for an explanation of who "we" are).

"Social Networking Site Guidelines Social networking tools and related third party applications are viewed as communication vehicles that provide a service to the user of our sites. These vehicles should be selected as part of a broader communication plan and used for the following purpose: * To provide easy access to University content and other content relevant to the U's disciplines. * To showcase the University as a leader and help to build relationships with key audiences."