Social Media for the professional - Twitter

I've been asked this question twice now in the last 2 days, both in a professional context.  The first was at the librarian workshare I attended at Bangkok, where so many people were saying they didn't get the point of twitter, and then last night by a friend who is an academic who has just published a paper in a prestigious journal and was wondering how to increase her online profile without it reflecting negatively on her professionalism.

I know I've been harping on about Threshold concepts, but to me, twitter is a threshold concept. I truly did not get it, until I got it and now I'll never go back again.

Twitter is a true "the world is flat" form of social media.

Step by step guide to using it on your terms:

Setup:
1. Get a twitter handle that uses your name or something you identify with (I messed this up and may have to start again at ground zero)  basically @something and register it.
2. Write a profile that is professional and makes you easy to find by people you want to find you.  Think carefully about key words.  This isn't about finding high school friends or long lost family or someone you met at the pub (that's for Facebook), it's professional
3. Add a picture.  A nice professional one, or an icon at a pinch. But not too silly.

Finding your tribe:
1. Work out what are the relevant hashtags (#) for your profession.  In the case of librarians, it's #libchat for librarians generally and #TLchat for teacher librarians.  That's for starters. Then you can start looking for librarians in your country or geographic area.  Or cataloging librarians, or archival librarians or whatever.
2. Type the hashtag into the search field and see who is saying what on twitter.  Find out who are the leaders and the movers and shakers who are directing you to something meaningful and sort them from the people posting pictures of their breakfast. Or kids. Or flowers.  Follow the interesting ones.
3. Choose your settings - either you want stuff to go to your email or you want it to stay on twitter until you choose to see it. Or you may want some people's wisdom to hit your email and others not to. 4. If you blog, or use facebook professionally or have a flipboard or use paper.li - sort out the settings so that your pearls of wisdom are fed to your twitter account for the edification of your followers. No followers? No problem, as you start to post meaningful things and retweet other peoples meaningful things people will start to follow you.

Asking questions:
Do you have something that's been causing you a problem professionally?  something bugging you? A resource you can't get hold of? Some highly erudite person you want to get into contact with? Try twitter.

I'll give 2 examples where it's worked for me recently.

1. After I got all enthusiastic about EWO and created a research guide and wanted some feedback (and permission) from Paul Fleishman, I found his twitter handle @EWO_PFleischman and tweeted him the URL.  Since then we've exchanged tweets and emails about the book and ways to use it in the classroom. Twitter created a direct line to the author and started a professional relationship.  Other famous authors who are active on twitter include Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself ) and Margaret Atwood (@MargaretAtwood)

2. The household algebra sagas continue, and I realised that once we'd gotten over the trauma of realising that "x" just stood in for a number that was unknown as of yet, the problem behind the problem was not knowing the difference between -1 where "-" was denoting that 1 was a negative number and 3-1 where "-" was denoting that "-" was a mathematical operation.

hmm I thought. This is most definitely a threshold concept. So bear with me.  I googled "negative numbers as a threshold concept" and "threshold concepts in maths" and found who was blogging on it.  Went to their blogs. Didn't find what I was looking for. Found the twitter handle of the most likely suspect (@maxmathforum) and the hashtag of his group and @justinAion and @_cuddlefish_ 

got back to me with some ideas.   @_cuddlefish_  in fact sent me the link to a fantastic resource on using positive and negative numbers in context. 

Reading only what you want to read when you want to read it:

Finally - we all suffer from information and email overload - won't twitter add to that? Not if you self select.  You can use a number of feeders to only get a digest of the hashtags you're interested in, I use paper.li and accumulate only the #TLCHAT and #EDCHAT  into a mini-newspaper that I read once a week.

What is twitterature?

Exploring storytelling using twitter is one of the many new "genres" in digital storytelling.  Here is Andrew Fitzgerald explaining what it is:




Viking / Penguin have taken the lead in this new format and there is a dedicated website to some of the best examples.

Social Media Frenzy (1)

I'm busy looking into various social media tools for International School Librarians for my next assignment.  And at the same time, I'm trying to resolve for myself what works and what doesn't to manage my own ever-increasing flow of information.  Over the next few posts I'll introduce each new tools I've found and give a link to what I've done with it.

I'll start with what I consider to be the most successful result - using paper.li to curate information flow from Twitter.  Now I must admit, that prior to doing my research I was pretty agnostic about Twitter.  I didn't really "get" it.  I didn't want a constant flow of information and my weekly updates were exhausting to look through, even if it was only 140 characters a post.  And, I think Brain Pickings tweets too much so I had a ton of stuff from them.

Then, I saw, according to the social savvy librarians in my survey, that Twitter was the highest ranked social media for professional use, and in the explanations, I was led to the hashtag #TLChat.  But then when I went to Twitter, I couldn't find a way to follow #TLChat.  So, Joyce Valenza to the rescue, as always.  She had a blogpost on how to feed twitter tags into a curated newspaper using paper.li - it's already 2 years old, but it still works perfectly - just goes to show how badly I didn't get Twitter.

Anyway, it works a treat, and here is the newspaper I made combining the hashtags for #TLChat, #EdChat and some other bits and pieces.  Now I need to make it all mobile and download onto my ipad.

Livin' and learnin'

First questions

(a) define what social networking is (in your own words);

In my opinion there are two types of social networking - that which occurs online, and that which occurs online. In both my online and offline worlds I enjoy having disparate networks of friends and connections who define parts of who I am and how I function in the world.  These days, my online and offline social networks often intertwine.

A network is basically a group of people who are connected to you by virtue of something you have in common.  For example, I have a network of friends who I work out with at crossfit.  We see each other at workouts and at functions organised by the box, but we're also active through Facebook where we post articles and comments and questions to each other.

On the other hand, I'm a member of LinkedIn, where I'm connected to people who I've worked with or come into contact with professionally - a few of them are personal friends, and some are Facebook friends, but most are not.

For many years I wrote a blog on bilingual chinese / english education.  I wrote this anonymously and over the years built up quite a following of anonymous strangers, some of whom became friends - we were united in a social network but most of us never met.

The best social networks are the ones that give you a buzz, where you're interacting, enjoying and learning and contributing all at the same time.  Funnily enough for me that usually works when I'm one on one with someone and we're "jamming" - not in the musical sense but in the app sense, and it's a case of "look what cool toy I found" and seeing how we can apply it to solve real world personal or professional problems (like today).  Or when you're trying to plan thing and you or someone knows someone who then knows someone else who would be perfect for a talk or presentation or bit of information that will complete what you're trying to achieve.

In order to have a good social network you need to be able to both "get out there" physically and network in real life, and "be out there" hanging out where your professional peers are hanging out - whether that's blogging, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or whatever else the flavour of the month is.  - And if your kids aren't doing it - it's probably not worth spending much time on.

 In the context of this course, social networking is probably referring to the networking that happens online.  

(b) list what social networking technologies and sites you already use (for personal, work and

study purposes); and

LInkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Diigo, Blogger, Flipboard, Youtube, Evernote, Goodreads, Whatsapp, Picassa, Google+, 

(c) describe what you expect to learn from completing INF506

Keep current, maximise and optimise my time online.  Coherence between the various platforms.