AS I’M FINALLY SITTING IN front of my computer to write this column, I’m frantically following real-time developments at one of the major conferences for web professionals working in higher education: HighEdWeb in Springfield, Mo. Even though I couldn’t make the trip this year, I can keep up with the greatest insights shared at the opening keynote, learn of the smartest tips presented during multiple sessions, and even get the lowdown on the parties, the food, and the quality of the internet network at the conference site. I’m thousands of miles away, yet I feel very connected to the community of attendees and all the action going on at this conference.
Twitter's 2007 blog award
obtained de facto a direct
pass to broader success with
technology aficionados.
No, I don’t have telepathic powers. I just use Twitter—following the conference hashtag: #heweb08—as many attendees of HighEdWeb did in October to post 140-character multiple updates about anything and everything happening before, during, and after the conference presentations.
Never had to pass on an interesting conference for budget reasons? Or wondering why you should read a column about a web service powering the dissemination of 140-character messages?
Here’s a short, 140-character answer about Twitter: It can help individuals and institutions reach out to their network to share info, request help, organize, and update everyone in real time.
A bit dry, I know. Here are a few more examples to illustrate the long answer.
At The Pennsylvania State University, Twitter has really brought together a core of web-related professionals. Instructional designers, social media folks, web managers, and marketing staff from all across the Penn State system—the College of Arts and Architecture; the Penn State, Great Valley campus; The Office for Research Protections; Penn State World Campus; the Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) department—are represented.
“We started off following each other around the time of the TLT Symposium, then connecting further through the Penn State Web Conference,” says Anne Petersen, assistant director of electronic communication for undergraduate admissions at Penn State. She answered my call for success stories using the social networking and microblogging platform, placed on Twitter itself back in September.
“It’s become a very tight little community of members who bounce ideas off each other, share fun things, use each other for any sort of questions,” says Petersen. At Penn State, all that connectivity through Twitter eventually led to a daylong professional development event last August. The new Learning Design Summer Camp was almost entirely designed by this community.
At the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Student Affairs Webmaster Todd Sanders has been an avid Twitterer for a year and half (902 followers and more than 4,100 updates at the time of this writing). So it was a natural move for him to secure and set up 16 different Twitter accounts for all the offices within UWG Student Affairs about a year ago.
Originally, it was supposed to be another way to distribute information to students. The experiment was rolled out over the summer by admissions, advising, and registrar’s offices. Early users among the different offices disseminated across campus discovered it was also an easy-to-use and efficient communication channel for these administrative office teams. “When everyone is up and running by the end of this year, it should be a great way to collaborate across Student Affairs and solve real problems faster, build stronger working relationships, understand current project workloads, etc.,” says Sanders.
EXPLOSION OF TWITTERERS
According to the Wikipedia entry about Twitter, the web service was initially started as an internal research and development project at Obvious, a San Francisco-based startup, in March 2006. A year after, it won the prestigious 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category, obtaining de facto a direct pass to broader success with technology aficionados. As of October 2008, Twitter was used by more than 3 million people according to Twitdir, a search engine for Twitter accounts.
Twitter also has a small but growing following among the higher education web and communication community, as indicated by the early results of an online survey I administrated in October 2008 about different web services targeted to this community. When asked about their communication channels of choice to receive professional development information, 19 percent of the 540 responders (all professionals working in higher education), named Twitter as one.
