Twitter- Week 5

In Week 5 Nigel asked us to look at articles which demonstrate how the social networking site Twitter can be used for educational purposes.
Since I had never used Twitter before I decided to register in order to get a personal approach to the articles Nigel gave us to read. The process of registering is easy but unfortunately I have no Twitter contacts yet, which makes it hard for me to analyse the network's communication tools. When clicking around the various section and reading through the "recent public updates" section I was quite surprised that the Twitter users are making their announcements in their own language.

In one of Nigel's articles, Doug Belshaw, a teacher, describes how Twitter can be used in order to improve practical communication. Teachers can use Twitter in order to remind their students about homework via their mobile phones. Twitter allows its users to enter their phone number and they will then be informed about their friends' updates via their phones. Doug Belshaw outlines the three different methods to use Twitter: (1) as a communications tool for collaborating researchers; (2)as a way to get students to focus in a concise (140 words) way on a topic; and (3) As a way for conference attendees to discuss topics, again in a concise manner.
Twitter is also ideal for library use and library reminders.

It was easy to sign up on Twitter, the website seems to be easy to use and it is perfect for sending short messages. Twitter offers the opportunity to keep your account private. It is partly blog, partly social network, partly sms tool and is ideal for its users to inform each other on "what they are doing".
"Users have 140 characters for each posting (or “tweet”) to say whatever they care to say. Many tweets do answer the question of what the user is doing, but plenty of others are responses to other tweets, pointers to online resources that the user found interesting, musings, or questions. Similar to social networking sites like Facebook—which has itself evolved to include mini-updates—Twitter lets users create formal friendships"

Even though I am not an expert of Twitter I consider it as far less distracting and more effective than Facebook. Twitter is very easy to handle and it seems to really add value to the traditional means of email, phone, and IM messenger communication. I will spend some more time on it and decide how it can add value to my existing communication patterns.
Thanks for the tip, Nigel!