Computer

Back at Online Educa in Berlin last December, I made the decision to undertake a three month trial of Twitter. I must admit I didn’t really get it, but I was encouraged by the enthusiasm of Jane Hart, Josie Fraser and others, and decided to give it a go. Well, the three months are now up and it’s time to reflect on my experience. Do I continue or call it a day?

The stats show a reasonable amount of activity: I am following 107 others, 286 are following me and I have made 343 tweets, which works out at about 3 or 4 a day. In practice, some days I don’t tweet at all, on others I suddenly remember Twitter and issue a bombardment of tweets, and on those days when I’m able to keep online continuously, I approach what I imagine to be normal Twitter behaviour, i.e. occasional tweets throughout the day. I’ve discovered I need some tools, in my case Twhirl, a Twitter client for my PC, and Twibble, which does the same for my Nokia N series phone. Technically all this has worked fine and cost me nothing.

Typically those who don’t use Twitter find it hard to understand why anyone would want to tweet and what they would find to tweet about, and that’s quite understandable because tweeting is not normal human behaviour, at least not for me. Twitter itself suggests that you answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less, and that’s where most people start. This is a bit like a Facebook status posting so, like many people, I configured Facebook to pick up my tweets and display them on my profile page.

Sometimes what you are doing is interesting to other people, not because they need to know but because what you do gives away a great deal about what it’s like to be you. From the early days of Facebook, I have been fascinated by what people have for dinner, watch on TV, read in the bath, do at weekends, etc., just as much as I want to know what they’re up to professionally. You don’t get this information from a presentation, a report, even a blog, yet somehow it brings you much closer to the real person – you feel like friends, even if you’ve never met.

Once you have a relationship with your Twitter network, you can start to be a little more demanding. In my case that means asking questions – how do you do this? what is your experience of that? Replies come back in minutes and certainly much more quickly than you’d expect from a blog or forum posting, but you need quite a large network to maximise your chances of receiving useful responses.

Of course this works two ways and the old cliche that you only get out of anything what you are prepared to put in certainly applies here. When someone asks a question and you can contribute a useful answer then of course you must. And if you’ve found a gem of a website, blog posting, video or whatever then you should share it.

As a learning and development professional it is obligatory to ask whether Twitter has potential as a learning tool. I’m not sure. It doesn’t, for me at least, have the power that blogging does as a stimulus for reflection. It doesn’t offer the potential for collaborative work that a wiki can provide. Nor is it likely to be as helpful in locating and sharing expertise as an enterprise social networking tool. But I’m sure it can work alongside all these and other tools and I would certainly never discourage the use of Twitter in a learning context.

In summary, Twitter is providing me with plenty of value, so I’m sticking with it. As someone who works from home, it keeps me in touch with a wide range of like-minded professionals. Whether the benefits I’ve found are universal, I couldn’t possibly say. So, if you’re not already tweeting, then you’re going to have to find out the same way I did.