Setting Up a Twitter Account Feb 2012

Workshop that I’m running this afternoon:

This afternoon I’m teaching my Twitter course, and this morning Twitter adds a couple of new features… so let’s highlight them here. The section ‘Mentions’ has been replaced with your user name (probably more intuitive anyway), but also highlights some other new activities, of which I can see at present who has recently followed me (which gives me the opportunity to go back in and see if I want to follow them back):

The second change is the addition of a new ‘activity’ strand, which seems to overlap somewhat with above, but with far more activity. Of particular interest is that it shows who the people you’ve followed have followed (so if you’re in the same interest group, you may well find them interesting also), and also what they have favourited:

I wonder how long before the third party apps (e.g. Hootsuite) incorporate them, as I often don’t go via the web interface at all.

This morning’s second session:

This paper, written by Dr David Rush and Dr Bex Lewis, was accepted (see abstract), and will shortly be presented on this panel.

These worksheets are available under a Creative Commons Licence, in that you can use/distribute the material freely , but Digital Fingerprint must be attributed, whether used as is/adapted.

• An overview of Social Media Tools (June 2011)
• Setting up a Twitter account (June 2011)
• Setting up a Facebook account (June 2011)
• Setting up a Facebook Like page (June 2011)
• Setting up a YouTube account (June 2011)
• Setting up a WordPress account (June 2011)

All are downloadable PDFs, and will be accessible from the Resources page.

Sometimes change has to happen slowly, to allow people to accustom themselves to things! I am very much not for doing things “the way we’ve always done it” because that’s “the way we’ve always done it”, but also not in “change for changes sake”.

The Academy

This year is my fourth at the Church and Media Network conference (starts tomorrow), and it’s been interesting to see how it develops. In 2007 I was in the ‘Academy‘, which seeks to encourage young Christians into media spaces, and I think all those I am still in contact with on Facebook are doing exciting things in the media.. so definitely worthwhile! Meeting Rachel from Rechord (who was training us) was the highlight of that event for me, especially when I realised that I could have run the sessions myself… a great confidence boost which has evidenced itself in later years! Those who are in this year’s Academy are already en route to the conference, if not there already…

The Twitter Feed

Last year I blogged on the growth of the Twitter stream… that the second year I was at the conference (as a delegate), there was around 6 of us tweeting away from a hashtag I’d suggested, last year there was real activity going on, and we suggested this year that there’s to be a third screen to the side of the main conference hall, enabling people to see what goes on on Twitter before choosing whether to join in (many of those at the conference are from a traditional media background (as the conference emerged from BBC meetups), and still getting their heads around social media). I would have been incredibly happy to have offered a ‘How to Tweet’ session, but am instead co-hosting a blogging session with Pete Phillips! These practical sessions, including podcasting, social media apps, etc. are a great step forward, and how much more social media will we see this year, who will join in from the outside (we know that Peter Ould isn’t there, but will be interested in what’s going on), and what will The Church Mouse say about it this year!

http://tweethacking.com/twitter-t-shirts/tweet-no-evil-t-shirt/

If you’re interested in social media and faith, don’t forget about CNMAC11 also!

What to wear?

If you’re there, look forward to seeing you, and in memory of the wonderful John Daniels, need to decide on which are the most appropriate t-shirts for this year… as we’d talked about having a “getting people talking t-shirt” competition this year … although I think most of mine have been seen!!

Themes: Broad Tents & Strange Bedfellows; Making Things Happen (ALTC11)

This paper has been accepted.

This paper reports on attempts by a digital steward (Wenger, White and Smith 2009) within a university to increase her expertise in the deployment of social media for education (Conole and Alevizo 2010), through collaboration by means of social media with digital stewards in other institutions. The development of collaborative communities can be described with the framework of ideas associated with the notion of a Community of Practice (CoP). It was envisaged that a CoP of utility to a digital steward might be established through intensive activity with a social media tool and for this Twitter was chosen.

This activity has continued for some two years and has latterly been cast as an action research project with the aim of learning lessons of help to others similarly placed having a need to promote digital technology with limited resources. Data has been collected about the extent of various types of interaction through Twitter. Observations have also been made of the cross-linking between social media tools that arises organically as one tries to make effective use of a single tool.

Several categories of data relating to Twitter use have been analysed in order to find indications of community formation. For example the similarity to the stated interests of the observed Twitter account of the interests of the account’s followers characterises the commonality (or lack of) purpose of the group. Further insight has been gained through examination of the extent of: interaction, both electronic and non-electronic, with followers; the retweeting of tweets by the account holder and the followers; and the accessing of linked material on other social media sites.

One implication of this work is that in an era of readily accessible social media there will be less utility for people to come together in a defined social space, but that they will rather start by using these facilities to create what might be called a personal CoP. Secondly it has been found that one social media tool by itself is unlikely to be adequate to create an effective social network; rather, several interlinked media must be used.

————————-

Conole, G. and Alevizo, P. (2010) A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education, Available from http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/EvidenceNet/Conole_Alevizou_2010.pdf [Accessed 30/9/2010]

Wenger, E., White, N. and Smith, J. (2009) Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities Portland, Oregon, CPsquare.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/62418070@N00/3908640763/

Dick Costolo was in full flow. The chief executive of Twitter – installed after a brief power struggle in the autumn of 2010 – was outlining his unifying vision for the company’s product at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. “Our mission,” he said, “is to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them.”

As mission statements go, it is up there with Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” and Google’s “organise all the world’s information and make it useful”. What Costolo did, in an impressive talk, was to pull out examples of how Twitter is used socially by everyone. He put up a picture of a sunset posted by a user who had added the comment “What a day … in more ways than one”. What does that mean? “Maybe a friend or loved one knows that there’s more meaning than that in it,” Costolo noted. The idea that tweets can carry more information that what is simply encoded in their 140 characters – that they have extra value to the user through their context – was powerfully made.

Read full story in the Guardian.