Tapping into Twitter

I've been aware of Twitter for a number of years. Recently, I've noticed that people are using it to connect with others of like mind and as a way to link into new knowledge, projects or happenings. This is an evolution from what I originally thought Twitter to be: an ongoing record of day-to-day happenings in the like of "just getting ready to dig into some yummy carrot soup and looking forward to an evening with a good book". I don't need to know this about people! "While the concept of Twitter seems a bit mundane, the implementation by online educators as a powerful professional development and communications tool is anything but" (Richardson, 2009. p. 86).

I can't see myself tweeting; I only intend on following a few people on Twitter. I wonder how this experiment will work out. For me, communication is a two-way street, so how can I be involved if I am only following others and not contributing? Perhaps it will be like lurking on blogs: enjoying what others are posting, but not engaging in conversation with them. We will see...

Today I am signing up for an account with Twitter.

That was easy. I navigated my way to twitter.com and then filled in the required fields to set up an account.
As part of the tutorial, I was asked to type in an area of interest, and then up popped Twitter accounts related to that area and I was asked to choose five of them.

For the next step, I was asked to add contacts from email accounts. This wasn't something that I wanted to do. I finally noticed at the bottom of the page a little "skip this step" in grey. I clicked on it and was directed to my account. At this point, I had a lot of Tweets to look at because I had signed up to follow 10 people during the orientation process. Since I wasn't interested in following a few that were in the first step of the orientation, I wanted to "unfollow" these "tweeters".

I followed these directions and was successful in "unfollowing" the people I had only chosen for the initial orientation to Twitter.

As I was exploring the help section of Twitter I came across this:

It reassured me to see that "being an observer is where the real values lies". Although, I guess that if everyone were an observer, then we wouldn't have anyone to follow! My next step is to add other "tweeters" to follow that will help me in my quest to learn more about digital technology in the educational system.

Works cited:

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.