Category: Social Media

a note about podcast 6 @The Undisciplined Room

This afternoon, STA and I had another fun, albeit free-wheeling and fairly cranky, podcast conversation about: what’s wrong with the Apple app store, becoming increasingly dispinterested, social media etiquette, #notbuyingit, bad Superbowl ads, live-tweeting, how awesome Keith Ellison is, making music only using iPhone apps, Fame (the 80s movie and TV show), and possible kickstarter projects. I love podcasting! While I would consider myself more introverted than extroverted (as a side note, I haven’t bought the newest book championing the introvert, Quiet, but I do have a sample chapter in my iBooks library), I do love good conversations. Deep conversations that make you curious, get you thinking and enable you to imagine new possibilities. I think podcasts can create the space and opportunity for interesting, intense and great conversations. Am I achieving that in my podcasts? Not sure, but I do know that I come away from my discussions with STA inspired and with new ideas. In the future, I think it would be fun to develop a podcast where I get to have great conversations with other troublemakers. Hmm…

Check out Episode 6: Cranked up

Word Count: 188

Feminist Apps from the Obama Administration?

I just tweeted about a link to another feminist-friendly app challenge from the Obama Administration (found via Feministing):

In the tweet, I also mention the two apps from Obama’s previous apps against abuse challenge: Circle of 6 and On Watch. I haven’t had a chance to check them out much (although some of my students reviewed them for an assignment last semester).

Are these feminist apps? Why/why not?

using twitter to talk back? #notbuyingit

Can twitter enable folks to talk back and resist sexist commercials?  The following tweet links to an article from Mother Jones that discusses how people watching the Superbowl tagged their tweets about the commercials with the hashtag, #notbuyingit. The hashtag was started by Miss Representation (check out their description of the project on their blog). You can check out an archive of some of the tweets, along with the commercials being tweeted about, in a storify created by Mother Jones. I really like how Mother Jones combines the commercial video with tweets about it; I can imagine some pretty cool class assignments that could use storify in this way! Feministing also discusses the hashtag. I wonder, do any of these sources link “talking back” with bell hooks? [implied answer: if not, they should]

 

on live-tweeting

Yesterday, while looking through old drafts of posts, I found one on live-tweeting. It seems to speak to a question that I posed at the end of one of my recent posts:

I wonder, does the point of twitter exercises for class and/or tweets in general, always have to be about “attracting other people’s attention”? What other goals do twitter users have besides attracting attention and sharing information?

Here’s the draft with some extra reflections from my most recent live-tweeting experience.

Fall Reflections on Live-tweeting

I’ve become increasingly interested in the value of live-tweeting for enabling me to engage (and document that engagement) with ideas and readings. While a lot of attention is given to twitter as a tool for sharing links and information, not enough attention is given to other potential purposes for twitter, like using live-tweeting to document the thinking/discussing/exploring/engaging process. Over the past few years, I have spent some time experimenting with and writing about my own live-tweeting.

While live-tweeting enables you to share/make public the process, the primary goal is not to share, but to document and archive a process and make that process accessible to others. For me, it’s great if people read my live-tweet notes; I can get feedback from them or maybe provide them with new information. However, I don’t live-tweet just for the purpose of sharing; I live-tweet because the brief character limit + the public nature + the easy interface encourages me to quickly/immediately post my reactions to/thoughts about key concepts and ideas. Plus, with all of the tools for archiving now, I can put all of those tweets together and create a timeline: a document of how I engaged with an essay/how I think. Live-tweets reflect how I think–something that is very important to me, documenting how I engage and communicating that with others. They enable me to make visible/expose my process.

Here are some ways that I’ve live-tweeted (using storify or screen shots, which is very tedious).

Yesterday’s Live-Tweet with @kjcfalcon

Yesterday afternoon, I did my first tweet-chat/live-tweet with my It’s Diablogical writing partner, KCF. She archived our tweets over at storify: Diablog(ical) Live-tweet with @Undisciplined (me) and @kjcfalcon. It was the first extended, explicitly dia(b)logical twitter conversation that I’ve done. My past live-tweets were almost all about taking notes for a class presentation or about a book, film, article. Occasionally those live-tweetings would involve interactions with other twitter users, but usually it was just me, in the moment, documenting my engagements. Here’s how I tweeted this fact:

At first, I thought it was difficult to keep track of everything that was being tweeted. I also found it difficult to respond to all of KCF’s great questions. And, I’m not sure, in the moment of tweeting and tweet-talking,  that we were able to achieve many deep moments of engagement (I think we had a few). However, I don’t think the deep and meaningful engagement needs to always come in the moment of the tweeting. Part of the live-tweeting process for me is to archive the tweets. Here’s what I tweeted about how and why this is useful:

I really appreciate revisiting past live-tweet archives. I’ve used past/archived tweets for remembering an experience of an engagement, finding key passages for blog/article projects, re-connecting with a text or idea that I had forgotten about, and for further reflection on ideas that “came to me” through the process of live-tweeting. Here’s one tweet exchange that KCF had during our live-tweet that I want to reflect on further (and which I think I’m already doing in this blog–at least a little bit):


I want to spend some time (soon, not now on a Saturday morning) developing a quick statement on how and why I use twitter.

Teaching with Twitter: Thick and Thin Tweets

Ever since I started thinking about using twitter in the classroom (and before I actually used it, which was in fall, 2010), I’ve been following the interesting and innovative work of David M. Silver and his media studies classes at the University of San Francisco. He has a helpful blog that he uses mostly for class assignments. I also follow him on twitter. Yesterday he tweeted to his class about an article that he had written for the Chronicle of Higher Education last May: Twitter Meets the Breakfast Club. He also assigned, via the tweet, another one of his articles from his blog: The Difference Between Thick and Thin Tweets

Here’s his brief description of thin and thick tweets:

thin tweets are posts that convey one layer of information. thick tweets convey two or more, often with help from a hyperlink.

While he encourages students to experiment with all sorts of tweets, he requires that they do thick tweets for his assignments. His blog post offers some great examples and explanations of how thick tweets work. I think this approach might be helpful for enabling students to think more carefully/deliberately about their tweets as forms of communication. I also think his introduction of the assignment, with so many help examples + explanations, is a great model for how to introduce an assignment.

I was struck by something he wrote at the end of his post:

As i wrote above, i encourage my students to use twitter in any way they see fit. but my bias is evident. by requiring them to post thick tweets and by encouraging them to pack multiple layers of information within 140 characters or less, i’m trying to teach my students how to craft creative, meaty, and to-the-point messages that attract other people’s attention.

I wonder, does the point of twitter exercises for class and/or tweets in general, always have to be about “attracting other people’s attention”? What other goals do twitter users have besides attracting attention and sharing information?