5 Ways to Use Twitter to help Learn & Educate

Twitter celebrated it's 5th birthday day before yesterday on 21st March & has covered a long journey since the first ever tweet done by Jack Dorsey (one of the co-founders of twitter) and then the millions of users & billions of tweets latter it has shaped & added a new dimension to the way we communicate. Jack celebrated the 5th anniversary with his tweet read by millions around the world . Twitter has had many uses in these 5 years whether it be for professional or personal use. Here we would like to discuss Twitter's impact on education & how it can be used for better management in a class or training room.

1. Information Organizer: With Twitter, it's very easy to organize the information around a particular agenda, theme or topic. Any relevant hash tag can be defined. When different participants in a room tweet about the topic being discussed with a particular hash tag, we can read all such tweets in a single stream by clicking on that hash tag or by searching or making a different stream for that hash tag on some twitter client like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Even tools like Twubs can be used to organize the hash tags. So, the students or participants can learn a lot by following particular hash tag where people usually tweet only about the relevant stuff. For example, #edchat is a hashtag used in some countries for educators to follow the discussion around educational material & techniques.

2. Parent-Teacher Interaction: If School & teachers have twitter accounts, this can be used very effectively to have individual contact with parents of the students & can be used to provide important information on the upcoming events, parent-teacher meets, cultural functions by students, report card etc.

3. Personal learning tool: Twitter has changed it's tag line twice from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" & now to "The best way to discover what’s new in your world". It shows the way evolution of Twitter has taken place from just a casual network to more information, knowledge & news driven platform as it is today. So, it's not strange when millions around the world follow relevant Tweeple similar to their interests or lists to gain knowledge & stay updated. Even school/college students can use it for information purpose apart from the professionals.

4. Holistic participation: Twitter has emerged as a very good tool to have real time interactions in a classroom while a lecture is being delivered or in a seminar hall. All the students or participants can contribute & participate in the discussion with each other using any web enabled device. It helps, as an online medium like Twitter removes their inhibitions of feeling scared to speak up or ask questions openly in the live session. All this has been beautifully captured in this video where Twitter experiment was conducted in a UT Dallas classroom by Professor Rankin.

5. Backup tweets: As Twitter doesn't keep your tweets after a certain period of time, it's important to backup your tweets since many of our tweets contain useful information which we may want to go back & refer to. There are various ways to backup mentioned in this post of RWW. I personally prefer BackupMyTweets.

What do you feel about these ways? Can you think of more ways where Twitter can be used in education or learning?

Online Behaviour vs Offline Behavior

I wanted to do a blog post on this topic when a friend of mine got enraged from my comments on Facebook although not directed at him. He even called me on phone & threatened to not make such comments again. In his anger he even said that i am 180 degree opposite of what i am offline. Although i will not go into much detail here as it is personal but still i would really like to think upon this aspect of our personality that is it true that our online behavior is different from our offline behavior?

Let's start with our offline behavior, we engage with other people in our daily lives at various junctures, whether it be at home, office, market, Gym, Park etc. We do official work at the office, at the same time we have fun with our colleagues. We do meetings with our clients or prospects. At home, we interact with our parents, have breakfast or dinner together & discuss various things or news with each other. We have a particular style of talking to different people at different situations. With friends we can joke around & talk all the rubbish stuff which we can't do with our parents or elders. At office our talks mostly pertain to official matters, new deals, things to do etc. Sometimes we are serious, at other times we laugh. With some, we have cordial relationship while with others it's bad which we try to turn around into positive. There are so many possibilities in the life of an average human being that we may have to write a separate book on it. And every person's behavior is different from any other person. It can't be same for even 2 persons. Some may like your behavior, while others hate it. Personally, i try to behave naturally with anyone in any situation. I have a firm belief that natural behavior always lets you take the right action.

On the other hand online behavior doesn't require that much effort as required in offline since offline involves all your senses plus physical action whereas for online even a smart phone is enough. On online mediums we don't have physical contact & no real face to face interaction although we can see each other's face digitally & converse over many devices these days. But the point is lack of physical presence actually makes you more creative & at times spices up the words you use in online chats or on facebook/twitter etc. We even tend to loosen up with someone on social networking sites even if haven't interacted with that person even though he may from your school, college or office where you could have easily interacted with him. These days so many dating sites are doing a lot of business but why? Because, people feel it easier to converse with each other with spicy messages & smileys on social networking sites rather than starting the discussion online. From online they take it offline latter on these cases. Sometimes, we tend to pull each other's legs (inherent in our nature) on social networking sites especially on facebook since it has it's own culture with pokes & multiple friends conversing under the same thread where we take stand on some point. Whereas in offline world, we usually tend to avoid heated discussions as it may lead to fights or confrontations. Anyway there is a risk of misinterpretation of your online comments because they have no emotions & emphasis attached to them, you mean to say something but it is interpreted in a totally different way!

So, the point is online mediums make it lot easier for us to express ourselves in various ways. Many things which we would like to share offline but couldn't share are shared easily in status updates on facebook & twitter. So, definitely there is marked difference between our online & offline behavior & it is up to the other people how they interpret our messages & even we need to take care from our side not to hurt anyone intentionally.

New social media platform: Soch.la

I recently joined Digital Vidya as their social media evangelist. The immediate role being to promote the new social media platform Soch.la (pronounced as a single word SOCHLA) conceived, designed & launched within a month by the team at Digital Vidya which is a feat in itself! The idea behind this platform is to allow the cricket lovers to share their opinions with their friends while the live matches are going on. The platform is still in beta & suggestions are being welcomed from the users to suggest changes or improvements. And the platform was opened to the public on feb 27, 2011 during the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup. Initial reaction from the users has been very optimistic & the development is going on with full enthusiasm!

So what's Soch.la?
In short it's a social media platform "By the users, For the users" or as of now "By the cricket lovers, For the cricket lovers"! Fans can do live commentary while they are watching cricket matches & share their opinions, jokes or have fun in their own style with their friends. Since all of us are commentators (casual but real), that's why Soch.la is the Largest Cricket Commentary platform! And in the process, one can discover many new friends! The idea is to let the platform be shaped by it's users & Digital Vidya assisting them to shape it up.

Join Soch.la & enjoy the live criket matches and let me know your feedback or any suggestions on how we can improve the platform further?

Update:
I would like to add some of the reactions here by the users out of the many captured on Soch.la: