Wednesday 4 November 2009

Twitter - The Mile High Debate

The next session was also a debate - on the usefulness (or otherwise) of Twitter. Very well attended sessions - standing room only, and about 40 people in the room actively twittering and others following the debate on line and contributing. We had our own hashtag and tweets were projected on the screen.

It was a real showdown, and began with the theme tune from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly followed by excellent role play from the two presenters. The loud, excitable academic who wanted to use twitter with his students, and the CIO who couldn't see the point, and in fact got annoyed with the audience for not paying attention to what he was saying because they were tweeting. At one point he likened the CIO to an orange cone, preventing staff from falling down potholes!

Very interesting debate, and best followed on Twitter - the hashtag was #edtwitter - and you can see the tweets here. Last time I checked there was 36 pages of them - but it's worth a read - I think you'll get a flavour of the session. And of course, once the role play was over, almost unanimous support for the Twitter, but I suspect it was a self selecting audience!

There's a good video here on the UTA Twitter experiment here if you want to see how Twitter can be used in education.

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