At the Future of Everything workshop a sizable portion of the attendees twittered during the event, including yours truly. It was interesting to have a back channel of conversation. I even had a colleague from Yale following the feed — a virtual attendee. But I also found it a little distracting and while an interesting experiment I’m not convinced it really added anything substantial to my experience. What role should Twitter play at a conference, workshop or in the classroom?
How People are using Twitter during Conferences(application/pdf Object) explores this in some detail. At the workshop the group twittered, but the twitter stream itself wasn’t really integrated into any of the presentations. In a couple of cases speakers referred to the twitter stream, and one person even displayed the stream briefly on screen. But that back-channel didn’t direct the direction of the talks or even the q&a portions. And I think it would have been better if it had been linked in more formally, because in the end it felt more like a distraction to me.
My conclusion — could Twitter be a useful addition to a live event? Yes. But it will benefit from some forethought, and some formalized role in the presentation. For instance at a conference it would be cool to have a central dashboard with live twitter feeds from each presentation — a good way to see what is being talked about and where you might want to go. Each presentation should include a displayed twitter feed for that session, to involve those who choose not to twitter themselves. And presenters/moderators would be encouraged to use the twitter feed to respond to questions and even use it themselves to post reference web links and other resources.
Wired Campus: Paper Highlights Pros and Cons of Twittering at Academic Conferences – Chronicle.com
…one of them raised a word of caution not seen in many excited blog posts about the promise of Twitter. “Twitter can be distracting,” the respondent wrote. “For people actually there, they maybe spend more time with their computer or phone than talking to people.”
Future of Everything Twitter feed – #acfoe
Teaching with Twitter VideoCast
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is it just me » How people use Twitter at conferences - looking for mentors on Jun 09 09 at 12:24 pm[...] Edit: In the meantime there are still some more reviews of our article available. Thx for your feedback. See reviews here and here and here [...]
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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