Welcome to Ten Days of Twitter, or as it’s called in twitterspeak, #YSJ10DoT !
Ever wondered if Twitter might be a useful tool for enhancing your teaching & learning, or developing your personal learning network? Not sure how to get started, or how it all works?
YSJ10DoT will help you to learn to use Twitter from scratch, build up your network and join in the conversation in 10 days!
Twitter is in many ways very simple to use – it’s just a micro-blogging social media platform on which you can post 280 character ‘tweets’ which your followers can see, and you can follow other people to see what they’re sharing. Sounds easy, and in fact, setting up an account, following people and sending tweets is easy.
And yet… for such a simple platform, Twitter is pretty complex. It’s not the functionality, so much as the conventions (@, #, RT, etc), the strategies for tweeting effectively and building a network, the plethora of ‘apps’ or third party tools to add on… Not to mention thinking about why you might want to use such a platform, and what you might use it to achieve, other than sharing celebrity gossip and what you had for breakfast.
At first people are often very sceptical – what could you possibly say that was of any academic or professional value in 280 characters? And why would anyone care to know what you are saying? How could Twitter possibly enhance your work in any way, other than a fun way to distract yourself from real work? To find out, view the YSJ10DoT schedule and register to participate in the next Ten Days of Twitter from Monday 16 April – Friday 27 April 2018
Over the ten days, we’ll be exploring Twitter together. During each of the Ten Days of Twitter, We’ll be sharing a daily post on a small aspect of Twitter, to get you up and running and exploring what Twitter might offer you. Throughout, we’ll be focusing very practically and specifically on what Twitter can offer you. None of these activities will take up very much of your time, so we hope it will be a worthwhile experiment for you! We’ll be interacting with each other too on Twitter, so you’ll be building up your network on Twitter very quickly! There are quite a few academics, faculties, programmes etc. on Twitter already, using Twitter to ask questions, find resources, collaborate on projects etc. – join us!
One important thing to remember: whenever you tweet about the programme, use the hashtag #YSJ10DoT so that we can find each other initially. We’ll explain more later!
To encourage full engagement, and to allow participants to evidence their Twitter skills, the TEL team will award an open badge for completing various (optional!) tasks over the course of the ten days.
We hope you’ll join us for Ten Days of Twitter – give it a chance, give it time for your network to build and get to know you, explore what it can do for you and make up your own mind!
TEL Team (@YSJTEL)
Ten Days of Twitter for Learning Developers was originally adapted from a similar programme for STEM researchers, also created by Helen Webster. The materials are available under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA.
The 10DoT Badges are adapted from those issued by University of Sussex’s Technology Enhanced Learning Team, which were also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Ten Days of Twitter has been adapted by Technology Enhanced Learning for use at YSJ, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License.
We are extremely grateful for the work put in by Helen Webster, the LD5Digital Things team and the University of Sussex’s Technology Enhanced Learning Team, and for sharing their great resources with the community!