Ferguson, H. (2010, June). Join the flock!. Learning & leading, 37(8), 12-14. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/issues/Join_the_Flock.aspx
Miller, S.M. (2010, June). Enhance your twitter experience. Learning & leading, 37(8), 14-17. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/issues/Join_the_Flock.aspx
In
studying the article "Join the Flock" I found myself immediately
confused with what a PLN was, luckily it was explained by the second
paragraph. A PLN is a community who learns together. The article takes
things step by step to guide you into building your online community to
learn from through Twitter, expressing how each step contributes to the
bigger picture of developing your PLN. Starting with setting up an
account and creating a bio and ending with the importance of
contributing to the stream of information created within you PLN, the
article has helped me understand why we created twitter accounts to
begin with. Originally I was extremely hesitant because I always vowed
to never create such a pointless social account but this article has
guided me to understand how important the 140 characters are in
establishing the foundation of a useful tool in education.
A
perfect compliment to “Join the Flock,” “Enhance Your Twitter
Experience” goes into the details of becoming an active twitter user and
continues to nurture the excitement of such a useful educational tool.
In reading the the article it seems there is a freedom to being limited
by 140 characters. It is enough to not “make a fool of yourself” while
still connecting people “to blogs and websites.” But I would have to
say my favorite part of the article is the twitter twerminology towards
the end. It seems that with every great Internet sensation comes a
flood of terminology that can overwhelm less familiar users. So I for
one am grateful to know about things like Hashtags, Twaffic, Tweeple and
so on.
Q1: How would someone be able to sort through the useless information on twitter to find helpful information?
Based
on my understanding of twitter and the article, it seems that this
could be best accomplished through the use of hashtags and following the
right set of people. I think that professionals would refrain from
posting/tweeting useless information as to maintain their professional
demeanor. At the same time, hashtags allow someone to sort through what
seems to be endless information for what is specifically useful to
them. Through time and dedication it would seem that the community one
builds on twitter would define how productive tweeting can be.
Q2: How could any real progress be made in conversations when everything is limited to such a small number of characters?
Often
when we look for information we can be overloaded with long pages of
information and descriptions. Having such a limited dialogue box allows
us to simply communicate in highlights rather than essays. Although we
can easily listen to one person’s long rant about what they feel is
important, having a 140 character limit allows for twitter users to sort
through dozens of opinions and thoughts in the time it may take to read
through what could be a useless thought of one person.
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