Ten Days of Twitter

This section houses an early version of 10 Days of Twitter – a programme devised by Dr Helen Webster – but you can find a more up to date version at https://10daysoftwitter.wordpress.com/ 

Ten Days of Twitter, or as it’s called in twitterspeak, #LD10DoT !

Ever wondered if Twitter might be a useful tool for enhancing your Learning Development work? Not sure how to get started, or how it all works?

Beginning 1st July 2013

[this iteration of the programme is now over, but you can still work through the materials in your own time or, if you’d like the experience of participating in a community of people all learning the 10 days at the same time, we can always run it again!]

Learn to use Twitter from scratch, build up your network and join in the conversation in 10 days!

Twitter is in many ways very simple to use- it’s just a micro-blogging social media platform on which you can post 140 character ‘tweets’ which your followers can see, and you can follow other people to see what they’re sharing. Sounds easy, and in fact, setting up an account, following people and sending tweets is easy.

And yet… for such a simple platform, Twitter is pretty complex. It’s not the functionality, so much as the conventions (@, #, RT, etc), the strategies for tweeting effectively and building a network, the plethora of ‘apps’ or third party tools to add on… Not to mention thinking about why a Learning Developer might want to use such a platform, and what you might use it to achieve, other than sharing celebrity gossip and what you had for breakfast.

Over the next ten days, we’ll be exploring Twitter together. During each of the Ten Days of Twitter, I’ll be sharing a daily short post on a small aspect of Twitter, to get you up and running and exploring what Twitter might offer you.  Throughout, I’ll be focussing very practically and specifically on what Twitter can offer a Learning Developer. None of these activities will take up very much of your time, so I hope it will be a worthwhile experiment for you! We’ll be interacting with each other too on Twitter, so you’ll be building up your network of other Learning Developers on Twitter very quickly! There are quite a few of us learning developers on Twitter already, using Twitter to ask questions, find resources and of course talk about the annual ALDinHE conference – join us!

One important thing to remember: whenever you tweet about the programme, use the hashtag #LD10DoT so that we can find each other initially. I’ll explain more later!

I have to admit, when I first explored Twitter, I was very sceptical – what could I possibly say that was of any academic or professional value in 140 characters? And why would anyone care to know what I was saying? How could Twitter possibly enhance my work in any way, other than a fun way to distract myself from real work? I’m now a real convert, and I must say that Twitter is now the social media tool I use most and which has been of the most practical value in my work and my career. Who’d have thought?

I hope you’ll join me for Ten Days of Twitter – give it a chance, give it time for your network to build and get to know you, explore what it can do for you and make up your own mind!

Helen

Ten Days of Twitter for Learning Developers is slightly adapted from a similar programme for STEM researchers, also created by Helen. The materials are available under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA.