When I first wrote about Twitter in Higher Education (back in November 2008) I’d not been using the service all that long or as frequently as I do now and it wasn’t until early 2009 that I really started to gather my thoughts about how to make the best use of it. So now we’re another year on I thought some of this worth revisiting and reflecting on some of my experiences.

The main value of Twitter, for me, is still very much the use of hashtags – especially the conference related ones I’ve been using a lot lately such as exeter10 and npc2010. During the CoFHE/UC&R joint conference I found following the exeter10 stream particular useful to engage with parallel workshops. Often you find there is more than one workshop you’d like to attend and so being able to attend your second choice virtually is the perfect compromise. It also helps if the presenters put their slides up later so you can revisit the session.

(Click to enlarge)

I think one of the reasons why Twitter worked so well at the CoFHE/UC&R conference was because those people using the tag mostly attended different sessions. It meant that anyone following the conference virtually wasn’t bombarded with exactly the same message over and over again and got a general feel for the variety of events taking place.

The sessions that ran for all delegates like the opening address, plenaries etc were also well documented and it was interesting to read other people’s interpretations of the key messages. In having the archive available it was much easier to write up my report as the gaps in my scribbled notes had (more often than not) been tweeted, retweeted and commented on.

Generally I think the npc2010 tag was even more successful but in many different ways. Whilst the eavesdropping on parallel sessions was as valuable as at exeter10 there was a greater emphasis on using the tag to:

• network;
• crowdsource;
• encourage speakers;
• circulate useful information;
• explore links;
• and generate discussion.

Prior to the conference a list of attendees/speakers was also set up to bring tweets together and closer to the time it became a great place to start when looking for a familiar face/avatar also attending.

However, unlike my previous experience I really feel the use of Twitter during the actual event had its drawbacks (never thought I’d hear myself say that!)… My main issue being the amount of times the same point was tweeted during the sessions attended by all. I think maybe we were all a little too enthusiastic and all wanted to tweet-along but I’m not sure about the value of this. Had I not have been at the event I probably would have found it rather annoying, but that’s just me personally.

At times it felt like I was shouting over people to get my tweet heard (maybe) or racing to type it up first (that’s just me being paranoid about being slow on the keypad though). At other times I chose not to tweet anything at all because others with more followers, more kapow and more engagement with our peer networks did it first. Sounds silly right? But it leads nicely on to my concern about the ‘clique’ question being raised and Twitter newbies not feeling able to contribute to the npc2010 stream.

Engaging with social media is a personal preference and I worry that the non-tweeting delegates felt in many ways pressurised to join up or worse like they were missing out. I don’t know if that was the case or not but there were times when the message really did feel like ‘to be successful you must Tweet/blog/network’ etc. What about the being good at your job part? I’ve been doing this whole social media thing a while because I like it, not because I think I should and I guess I really just wanted to stress the point that it’s not for everyone… If you don’t like it, you don’t like it and that’s fine too!

Maybe one of the ways to address the missing out part is to get the Twitter stream up on the big screen with Monitter or Twitterfall for example? As for the clique part…. um. That’s all I’ve got for now I’m afraid.

For a snapshot of how well Twitter was used during npc2010 take a look at this fancy Summarizr:

• Total tweets: 811;
• Total twitterers: 120;
• Total hashtags tweeted: 38;
• Total URLs tweeted: 88.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Libraries, Personal, Web 2.0 and tagged as conference, exeter10, networking, npc2010, social media, twitter. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.