Twitter at meetings and conferences

I'm very interested in using Twitter at meetings and conferences. If you have experienced this please contact me. I would love to hear the positives and negatives. This technology has a great deal of offer us in education. I dislike lecture style formats in a conference setting. This could be a valuable conversation.

Tags: Twitter, conferences, meetings

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rebecca on July 27, 2008 at 8:52pm

I'm jsut having trouble understanding how Twitter works - full stop!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Leigh Newton on July 28, 2008 at 5:30am

Rebecca, the secret lies in making sure you have sought out good friends for Twitter. I started with just a few who told me about their out of hours time, which was interesting but not connected to education. I now have deliberately sought out those who are twittering on education and find that the proportion of useful tweets has increased dramatically and I look forward to each tweet. Dswaters (from edublogs) suggested that people follow around 100, but from this vantage point that seems like overload.

Follow me on http://twitter.com/lnewton. ... and some more good educational twitterers: http://twitter.com/elearningnews, http://twitter.com/jomcleay

Steve, I only have experience of having used Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com/ with 64 people around the world. That was organised through this Ning community. The presentation continued in .ppt form with voice in realtime, while participants typed their conversations in a side-box. It allowed for quiet interaction in response to the presentation. There is also a box to indicate that you wish to speak.

Not quite Twitter in a meeting but not dissimilar. I hear Blackboard is similar.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Mark Marshall on May 5, 2009 at 1:00am

Just got back from Apple Leadership Summit. Everyone was twittering during the conference. They would post tweets during the conference (after breaks). You should then #topic during tweets. So for the Hong Kong Summit, tag was #hksummit so if you add this to your tweets, will come up in search topic.

Backchat channel is nice too so you can chat during conference.

See my blog post with links to Twitter page and backchat.
http://markmarshall.edublogs.org/2009/05/02/its-not-about-the-stuff...

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ann on May 5, 2009 at 11:42am

I have used Twitter at a couple of conferences. The positives for me were being able to ask others in the room a question and get an answer. It gave a window into the room to others following me on Twitter. I was able to hear other people's perspectives on what was being said. A negative is that sometimes you can get lost in a side conversation and miss what is being said within the conference session. You might bother others by distracting them with your typing.

There is a nice wiki set up with many different teachers who have been contributing their ids. It is called Twitter4Teachers. I've been using the service for almost two years. As Leigh said, you really need to build a base of people to communicate with. Try to find 50-100 people and join in the conversations. Most revolve around teacher topics. People also share bits of their daily lives. It is fun to attend conferences after being on Twitter for a while. You build nice relationships and then have the pleasure of meeting those folks face to face.