I have created a class account on a micro-blogging tool called Twitter. A micro-blog is a very short blog entry or message (on Twitter it is less than 140 characters). It is almost like an instant message. The difference is that people can sign-up to follow your tweets, or twitter posts, and you can sign-up to follow other peoples. The result is networks of inviduals having dialogue. Justin Reeve, the Weber School District webmaster, introduced me to Twitter. He has followers from around the world and he follows individuals from around the world.
The potential positivie uses of this in education and other fields is tremendous. For example, just a few days ago a teacher that I follow that lives on the East Coast, asked for ideas about how to use a document camera in an English class. All of his followers received his tweet. Those that had ideas were able to respond. He potentially could have received responses from around the globe.
For my class account, I will make brief posts throughout the day about what we are doing. There are a few different ways to follow along. The first is to subsribe to the RSS feed for the class Twitter account. The address for this feed is: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/16128756.rss. A second way is to create a Twitter account at http://twitter.com and sign-up to follow the class. A third way is to visit this blog. On the right side you will see a small section titled “Class Tweets”, this is linked to the class Twitter account and updates as new tweets are posted. If you would like to know more, please post a comment/question.