Reflections on the productive use of Twitter

Week 7

In this week’s assigned reading, Attention, and other 21st-century social media literacies, Rheingold made three salient points.

The first point made is that Twitter requires knowledge of your public. What I learned from this is that for Twitter to be effective as a learning environment, an instructor would need to understand the way in which a student perceives its usefulness and then harness that perception into a valid learning experience. Hence “knowledge of your public.”

A second point of the productive use of Twitter, and social media in general, is how your participation meets their needs.

My understanding of this is that there is something to be learned about how to participate in a way that's valuable to others as well as to myself. For example, if I want ab initio pilots, whose first language is not English to learn radio communication, I would post on Twitter an image of relevant aircraft followed by a LiveATC audio stream of the control tower communicating to the pilot in command. I tweeted this recently on Twitter when President Obama flew in Marine One to the Santa Monica airport. Why did I do this? I did this because I knew that my participation in using an image of Marine One and the LiveATC audio stream would meet the needs/interests of my constituents.

The third point to takeaway is what I got in return for having tweeted a relevant news piece. The return on my effort was an overwhelming response to something that was useful and a valid learning experience for my audience. 

In short, knowing my audience, how my participation meets their needs, and the return on investing in what’s relevant to my constituency makes Twitter and social media an effective learning environment.

Tweet on! 

Resources

Rheingold, H. (2010). Attention, and other 21st-century social media literacies. EDUCAUSE Review, 45(5), pp. 14–24. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/attention-and-other-21st-century-social-media-literacies