When building your Personal Learning Network, it is important to gather information from a wealth of sources. Using Twitter connects yourself to an enormous network, which can help in your professional development. The use of Twitter starts with the creation of an account and making it personal; by adding a picture and a short bio that describes yourself to people who may want to follow you. If you have ever been an individual that hasn’t been included in a group, there is a certain amount of anxiety in approaching the group. Twitter dissolves this anxiety and makes it easier to be included. As the article states, “you are invited from the start”.
After following people, you can retweet their tweets, which will increase the number of people able to view it. By using hashtags, tweets will be given even more exposure. After passively participating in Twitter by viewing your followers’ tweets, you should begin adding your own tweets which will assist your PLN by including it in your thinking. McClintock Miller, S. (2010, June/July). Enhance your twitter experience. Learning and Leading, 37(8), 14-17. Retrieved from http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/learning_leading/20100607/
There are also Twitter organizational managers, such as HootSuite and TweetDeck. These tools organize your twitter streams into columns, which can be sorted and organized. This way, your favorite hashtags or groups can be closely followed. There are also tools, such as Hootlet, which allow you to create a “bookmarklet”. This bookmarklet is a retweet of a link and can be a useful tool when sharing a resource with your PLN. Using these tools can help you be strategic when using Twitter and ensuring that the majority of your experience is used to share ideas.
Q1: Are there drawbacks to using Twitter to develop your PLN?
It seems that the impersonal nature of Twitter is a positive aspect in that it is easier for people to share information and become involved in groups that they normally would not be included in. However, this aspect of twitter might limit the sharing and limit the quality of the information. If people do not actually know the people that are in their PLN they might be less likely to respond to requests or discussions.
Q2: Is there information on Twitter that I am interested in or that can be useful to me?
There is nothing in the world that isn’t on Twitter. Everything from exotic cat clubs to organic shade gardening seem to have a corner in the tool. If there is information you are looking for it, there are most likely resources you have not been acquainted with on Twitter.
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