Learning at Work Week: Twitter

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?

Twitter is in many ways very simple to use – it’s just a micro-blogging social media platform on which you can post 140 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.

If you’re curious, and would like to learn more, then you can learn to use Twitter from scratch, build up your network and join in the conversation in just 10mins per day for 10 days with our ‘10 Days of Twitter‘!

Over the ten days, you can explore the different features of Twitter, and find out how it can be used to benefit you. During each of the Ten Days of Twitter you can read a daily post on a small aspect of Twitter, to get you up and running and exploring what Twitter can do.  Throughout, you’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! You’ll soon be interacting with others 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!

Phil (@PhilVincent)