To tweet or not to tweet?

I have not done a tweetchat in years and almost forgotten how it goes. Fortunately, our ONL course coordinators planned a tweetchat activity and also provided this cool little ,tutorial on using Tweetdeck to help get everyone on onboard.

The tweetchat was like a whirlwind. Think instant messaging but on steroids. For the regular twitter users, it may be effortless to you. However, I had to concentrate fully to keep up with the barrage of questions, replies during the tweetchat. It was quite a challenge but also rather fun.

On a related note, in the same week, I had a very good sharing session with my PBL (team 4) group where we touched on the ,dangers of sharing personal information or views via social media. Sinead shared her personal experience of commenting on a sensitive topic via twitter which gained her a stalker. The whole story was quite scary, and no doubt is one of the reasons why some educators choose to stay away from social media platforms. It gave me a new perspective of the case scenario of why the teacher wants to separate social from her professional life.

However, there are always 2 sides to a coin. We cannot ignore the ,positives of using social media in education as well as ,how widely adopted twitter is. So, even though it scares me somewhat, I decided to take a leap of faith and jump directly into the deep end of the pool. Hopefully my ONL222 course mates who are better “swimmers” (,tweeterers – how could this even be a word?) will watch out for me.

Ok, enough with the scary stuff. Honestly, the tweetchat on 11 Oct 2022, 1pm CEST was actually quite fun! One of the highlights for me was while on the debate of how technology can lead to addiction, David White hit me with a cool quote “We aren’t addicted to technology, we are addicted to being social”.

It was just too good not to make a meme out of it.

How do you like the Meme I made for class?

Jorg prepared several thought provoking questions which were peppered throughout the tweetchat. For those of you who missed it, I have reproduced them below. To see responses, check out ,OpenNetLearn’s twitter handle (@OpenNetLearn) or search via hashtag #ONL222

Q1: How would you describe your relationship with the ‘digital’?

Q2: How might you improve your own digital literacies?

Q3: Which digital spaces make you most anxious or annoyed?

Q4: What digital spaces or practices do you think your students are anxious about, and why?

Q5: What digital capabilities are most important to equip our students with?

Before I knew it, 60 minutes had passed and the inaugural ONL222 tweet chat had come to an end. A tsunami of information, views and witty comments were shared during that 1 hour blitz. I also found myself following some coursemates (@DrSEldh and @JHTHoppenreijs) who left a strong impression.

It took me quite a bit of effort to stick to a new blogging habit. Where will my twitter be located in my ,VR mapping diagram in 6 months time? Will it even still be there? 🙂

Looking forward to the next topic 2 that focuses on “Open Learning & Sharing”.