Do y’all Twitter?
May 2nd, 2008 @ 18:05
Posted by: Tyler
Today I brought the training group SwiftKick to campus to give the faculty and staff at SAC a little lesson in how to use some of the new technology students use daily. Using this new technology like Facebook, MySpace and Mozes they are seeing huge increases in student engagement. I’ve been applying a lot of their philosophies to my work in Student Life since I started. Facebook and MySpace are the best ways to reach students- they don’t check their .edu emails so I send them bulletins on MySpace and Wall Posts of Facebook. Facebook was only around my last 8 months in college so I didn’t see how useful and effective it could be, but there is so much potential there. My Student Life geekiness definitely shines when I see/hear presentations like the one that was made today. Anyways they shared a lot but something that was total news to me was that this thing called Twitter is out there- its like the status updates on MySpace and Facebook- you can tell your friends and the whole world exactly what you’re doing and how you feel. Only that’s all this site is- there’s a mini profile type thing but really its just there to answer the question “What are you doing?” (now). And people can get a little like RSS feed or pop-up instant message that says “Tyler is at home being lazy on her couch” or “Tyler is on her way to work”. Seriously - its like a totally new way to stalk people and find out exactly what they’re doing every moment of the day. You can update it from your phone- so people literally can update it every hour and somewhere out there in cyber space someone is going to see what was just updated. So the SwiftKick person (Kevin) asked the students and faculty/staff that were there if this was a technological tool we were using yet- the faculty, staff and I included said no- but one of the students said that she thought about 1/2 the students that were involved already in MySpace and Facebook were using this tool also. I was shocked. So I got on right then during the training (I’d already been through the morning session) and when you sign up it lets your search your email contacts and see if any of your people are on it and none of mine were. So I sent out a massive MySpace question to see if any of my MySpace friends are on it and I’m just waiting for the results. Because y’all are oh-so-technologically savvy I wanted to check and see if any of y’all have heard of it or your thoughts and feelings on it. Its called Twitter and its free. There’s a quick summary video on their first page- but I still don’t know- I’ll see if some of my students find me otherwise I’m just not sure this is something I could get into.
May 2nd, 2008 19:43
Several of the bloggers I read regularly Twitter. Dooce became a big fan and her “Tweets” are in a sidebar on her site. Here is where she first gushes about it: http://www.dooce.com/2008/03/25/tweet-tweeted-have-done-tweet
I don’t expect to become that plugged in anytime soon. I’m only using my Blackberry as a phone, address book and calendar.
May 2nd, 2008 21:42
My links didn’t show up- I put links in the email and they didn’t come through- HELP!
May 4th, 2008 01:43
John (Leslie) twitted with me for awhile and gave up. Lately I found myself getting lazier in keeping up my blog and rely more on Twitter to update what’s going on in my life. So I created a feed onto my blog (and my Facebook page) that gets updated everytime I Twit. Good thing about Twitter? Short quick updates. Bad thing about Twitter? In addition to becoming such a Twitterhead and obsessive (addicted to) about using these what I sometimes call “social services”, you only get like 140 words or something, so having ability to write haiku helps.