Group items tagged

I told him what I thought of Twitter as a micro-blogging service: it’s a collection of emotional grunts. But it’s wonderful nonetheless. And enough people are hooked on it that Twitter has reached critical mass. If something big is going on in the world, you can get information about it from Twitter. Twitter also gathers other information, like people’s experiences with products and services as they interact with them. A couple of months ago, for example, I was stuck in the airport and received extremely poor service from Lufthansa. I twittered my displeasure, which made me feel better - at least I was doing something besides wait in an endless line. I’ve also Twittered complaints about the W Hotel (no Internet, cold room) and Comcast (the usual Internet gripes).

When I log into BlackBoard, I see about 30 different things I can do, and for each I have to click a link and go to a page to do the action.  Twitter strips away the features, instead using an inherently flexible textual space to facilitate communication, accomplishing the same goal of other feature-ridden “course technology.

I see Twitter’s artificial limit on post size as an important factor in classroom success.  First, it keeps the information space managable, meaning information is economized and easily retrievable

Twitter’s short form as a communication equalizer

one of the functions that networks such as Twitter does is to serve as something of a human powered feed, a real time living stream of links, content and conversation often times generated by our friends, peers or the people we look to as "filters"—indivisuals who we trust to seperate the wheat from chaff.

the internet is still about information—but it's also about attention

We have a deficit in attention.