I was listening to SOS Podcast #30 recently and was intrigued to hear about TwitterTim.es.
I’m wondering whether services like TwitterTim.es might hold the key to getting the teachers at my school to really understand the power of Twitter. Recently I have been a little obsessed with the disconnect between the obvious potential of having an online PLN and the difficulty getting most teachers to commit to building a PLN. In particular I am trying to help get an Independent School Ning up and running in BC, but in general I am trying to help as many teachers at my school as possible realise the potential of the internet. The biggest barrier that I am coming up against is TIME. Everyone is just too busy to check Twitter a few times a day, or open their RSS reader, or even read that extra email in their inbox. This is where I think a site like TwitterTime.es might be really useful; I imagine setting up a session at my school in which I guide the teachers through setting up a Twitter account and following a critical mass of educators with similar interests (I’m still not sure what that critical mass is), then all they have to do is create a TwitterTim.es page for their account that they can check for the latest news and resources whenever it is convenient.
There are still two difficulties with this scenario. The first is that Twitter is a lot more than just a fancy real-time newspaper. It is about conversation, it is about relationships, and it is about collaboration. These are (in my opinion) the real benefits that I want teachers at my school to understand, but I am starting to wonder whether it might be enough to start by helping them become “Power Lurkers” and hope that once they have some idea of the potential of online community they will be motivated to delve in more deeply.
The other difficulty is the act of ‘following a critical mass of educators with similar interests’. This took me about two years of messing about with Twitter and I think I was relatively successful for two reasons: 1) I like messing around with new tools and 2) my area of interest in Ed Tech and there are lots of Ed Tech people on Twitter. What I want to figure out is how to harness Twitter Lists and Twitter Directories like Twitr and TweepML to help anybody with any interest find people to follow on Twitter.
I have tried to do it for my brother who has an interest in Oceanography and couldn’t find any useful lists to follow. I also tried searching Twitter for ‘Oceanography’, but again came up short. I finally typed ‘Oceanography Twitter’ into Google and got a few hits. By then working through the follower and following lists of the profiles I found I was able to find 20 or so people and organisations that might interest someone in Oceanography, but it was tough going and I can’t really imagine most people bothering. During this process it occurred to me that finding good people to follow has less to do with subject matter and more to do with common interests. I think if I can nail down my brother’s interests I might have more luck helping him get started.
Twitter4Teachers is another good resource and I guess a teacher would probably have good success clicking through this wiki to find followers, but still it takes TIME. Eventually shouldn’t we all just be able to find a few good lists of people with similar interests and be a couple clicks away from being ‘Power Lurkers”?
So what is the quickest way to find people with similar interests to follow? And do you think that sites like TwitterTim.es might get more people interested in Twitter?
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Hi Phil,
I’ve really struggled trying to sell the benefits of Twitter to my colleagues. I’ve presented at a staff meeting and did a workshop at a district NID on building a PLN but still only two other staff members are on Twitter.
I think time, interest, overcoming the fear of tech and priorities are the reasons why people aren’t signing up. I agree that time is a major factor. I know how much time I’ve invested in the last six months on twitter; it is considerable. Like you (and unlike my un-techie colleagues) I have an interest in technology and integrating it into my practice. Because of that, and because I’m not afraid of technology anymore, I’ve made it a priority in my professional practice. Convincing people to create a PLN and tweet really only seems to work when people have some intrinsic motivation to do so. It has to be relevant to them to spend the time to learn and use it.
To answer your question, I would definitely show Twitter4Teachers and Twitter Lists. Also, finding a few solid people with similiar interests who have a good following and then going through who they follow and who follows them is also a good idea. TwitterTim.es will appeal to a certain group, probably those who habitually read online newspapers. Let me know if you have any major insights so that I can try them out on my colleagues!
Hi Errin.
I’m not really sure why I’m not giving up on trying to sell my colleagues on building their own PLNs as it often feels like swimming against the current. Even the teachers that have signed up for Twitter haven’t really gotten through the initial stage of not following many people and not being followed by many, which makes the whole thing seem sort of useless. But I do think that the advent of Twitter Lists might change all that once enough good lists of enough good teachers in enough areas of interest get created and aggregated somewhere.
I think you are right about TwitterTim.es appealing to a certain kind of person. I think that in general all of this pro-d stuff around technology needs to take into account that teachers, just like students all learn differently and will use technology in different ways.
Thanks for reading (I always know that at least you will read what I write).