One of the requests of the class this week is to become familiar with Twitter, Diigo, Flickr, and YouTube and to think about how to best use them to support learning. Since I already have some familiarity with Twitter and YouTube, I think I'll begin there.
I see Twitter as being extremely useful for teaser campaigns - putting down a couple of lines to pique the interest of your followers, then posting a URL to the full story. Right now, if I were to see a tweet about learning about Diigo, I'd probably check it out, because it's completely new to me, and I appreciate first-hand user advice. The biggest limitation I see with Twitter is the length of the message it can convey. 140 characters isn't a lot, and multiple tweets within a few minutes REALLY annoy me! I've contemplated turning off mobile notification for that very reason - I have a couple of friends who seem to do no work! (I really like the related feature for Facebook, where you can specific between which hours you'd like to receive mobile notifications - no middle-of-the-night messages for me!)
As for YouTube, I think it's wonderful for brief instructional videos. As I mentioned in one of the class posts last week, I have viewed videos on YouTube that helped me learn to toss pizza dough as well as make a better Pad Thai (my husband wholeheartedly approves!) It really brings brief procedures to life in a way that instructions on a screen simply don't. And I know, I've written LOTS of them. Now, it happened in my case that the videos I viewed were also more interesting subjects - cooking works well in video, and some things don't.
Now, time to go brush up on Flickr (wonder what my password is, it's been awhile) and explore Diigo.
In virtual exploration,
Alisa
Web 2.0 Gets Real
15 years ago
Posts
Alisa -
ReplyDeleteI agree about You Tube, but Twitter is so perplexing. I have found that it is most useful if you already have followers in your real life or if you have a network or group of people to follow. A friend of mine who is a beat reporter for a baseball team is already being followed so Twitter makes sense. I am not being followed, except for my dog and she has no interest in what I am doing.
The learning would come in handy with a network to get information from. But, I can't say that other forms of communication like email and Facebook don't already do this for me.