The essential ProfHacker introduction to Twitter is Ryan’s appropriately titled post, How to Start Tweeting (and Why You Might Want To). He covers all the basics, including creating your profile, using lists, and following hashtags. But we’ve written quite a few other posts about this popular social media platform:
Making the Most of Twitter
Erin’s primer on Choosing #Hashtags explains how to make the most of this feature of Twitter.
I wrote about Using Twitter Lists to streamline your reading experience.
Guest author Lee Skallerup Bessette wrote about How to Archive Your Favorite Tweets.
Jason recently explained how to Preserve Peace of Mind by Disabling Retweets.
Brian wrote about Integrating Tweets into WordPress Blog Posts.
Mark explained how you can deactivate your Twitter account -- and also revive it, within a 30 day window.
Doug Ward explained What to Do if Your Twitter Account is Hacked.
Mark explained Hacking an RSS feed for Twitter Hashtags.
Teaching with Twitter
Mark has offered a Framework for Teaching with Twitter, which emphasizes that there is no single right or wrong way to teach with Twitter:
It can be an effective one-way communication tool for sharing news or broadcasting links over the weekend. Or it can be used in class itself as a two-way backchannel. Or try Twitter as a platform for reflective thinking, asking students at the end of class to sum up the most valuable lesson of the day.
Mark has also written the very helpful Practical Advice for Teaching with Twitter which focuses on organization, access, frequency, substance, archiving, and assessment.
In Reflections on Teaching with Social Media, Brian compared interactions in his courses that used Twitter with one that did not.
Ryan explains how and why he uses Disposable Twitter Accounts for Classroom Use to avoid what Jason has called the creepy treehouse problem.
Twitter Archives
Mark has written several posts about archiving your tweet stream, including:
Twitter at Conferences
Adleline’s Best Practices for Live-Tweeting Conferences includes resources from scholars in different fields.
Anastasia’s Presenting for Twitter at Conferences explains that when audience members tweet about your presentation, “there’s also value to you as the presenter–feedback, a chance for extended conversations, and even the potential for finding collaborators, publishers, or new venues to share and grow your ideas.”
Guest poster Derek Bruff wrote about Encouraging a Conference Backchannel on Twitter to “provide participants a way to share ideas and resources from the sessions they attend, connect people who might not have connected otherwise, and broaden the conference discussion to include those not physically present.”
What do you want to learn about using Twitter? Let us know in the comments!
[Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user Smudge 9000]
