We checked in everyone’s blog tonight together, while someone has developed a cool blog. This personal space enable people to share things, connect with friends, and improve writing etc. And, now I still remember Elliot’s practice of British accent, Shuya’s deep understanding of Connectivism, and above all Jason’s long paragraph. Thus, blog is not just used as a tool to share personal issues, but also a tool to enable people to recall the specific information embedded in your friends’ place. Similarly, I always like to practice my English listening by watching movies without subtitles. Therefore, I am not only able to recall the vocabulary I have learnt from movies, but also use it in similar movie settings.
Furthermore, I as a teacher have to introduce an article on how people are using Twitter during Conference. The twitter is a useful tool for micro-exchange of information and communication (Reinhardt, Ebner, Beham & Costa, 2009). Since I am a heavy Facebook user, it’s not hard for me to figure out the use of twitter, which I have never used before. The microblogging like Plurk, Jaiku, is providing extremely useful for fast exchanges of idea and information sharing. Take myself as an example, I always like to share the cool things I heard with friends via Facebook.
An interesting aspect of microblogging is that users are able to hashtag one’s mirco-post, or tweets. What is hashtag? Hashtags are a simple way of grouping messages with a “#” sign followed a name or a special code with form a unique tag for a special purpose. And, such hasgtags are especially meaningful when used during a particular period of time, because it not only allows people to generate a resource based on that special thematic, while using the hashtag, but also bridge knowledge, and knowing, across networks of interest (Reinhardt, et al., 2009).
Six purposes for use of hashtags are as follows. (See http://twitter.pbworks.com/w/page/1779812/Hashtags)
•Events or conferences, e.g.: "Tara's presentation on communities was great! #barcampblock"
•Disasters: "#sandiegofire A shelter has opened up downtown for fire refugees."
•Memes: "My #themeword for 2008 is conduct."
•Context: "I can't believe anyone would design software like this! #microsoftoffice"
•Recall: "Buy some toilet paper. #todo"
•Quote: "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
What does hashtag look like in authentic ways?
Then, how to create group on twitter?
Check it out on third party site, hashtag.org, to know how many users use a certain hashtag on Twitter. (I’d like to check in “Thanksgiving” since it one week left.)
The result shows me how often is the Thanksgiving being used and the latest one used.
Another example “Bloomington” is not as hot as the Thanksgiving, for sure.
Moreover, twitter can be used at different stages of a conference. Take Facebook, a tool similar with twitter as an example. I joined a conference in Singapore this year (the conference, the night scene with Casino imagine that!, sentosa). The conference organization provided attendees with detailed information on place, time, agenda, and so on via Facebook. During the conference, Facebook was often used to take notes, post reflections, and above all share pictures with everyone. And, after the conference, Facebook was used as means to give a huge thank to all participants as well as the conference organization, and also celebrate the success.
Further, twitter is view as a tool to discuss, spread and share information as well as build “tie of soft communities”, as it allows people to be a part of community by tracking the hashtags as well as enables networking and knowledge building.
References:
Wolfgang Reinhardt, Martin Ebner, Günter Beham, & Cristina Costa (2009, March). How People are using Twitter during Conferences.
Hi Jia-Sheng
回覆刪除I really enjoyed your post on blogging, specifically how to use hash tagging in twitter.
The use of twitter and facebook in conferences is a great way to share knowledge and stay up to date, but I am concerned with the issue of distractions and overdoing the sharing. Sometimes it can be very distracting in a conference to facilitate such uses, also I am having a hard time going through all the conference update posted by multiple people.
Abdullah
Actually, you did an excellent job in explaining all those term to me that night! And late congratulations on your voted as best teacher for that day. Just like Abdullah concerns, do you think it is a good idea to use twitter in business conference? I think it is a good way for people to use Twitter to update their recent news; I still have little doubt how can Twitter be effectively be used into meeting. But maybe it is just because I never see how Twitter can be used in conference by my eyes; I still wonder how the system works!
回覆刪除Yue