Shamed into action by the excellent quality of elearning blogs in my Google Reader, I want to reflect on some conversations at the recent Learning and Skills Group.
Round a table in a Social Learning discussion went the question 'who here uses Twitter?'. Fewer hands than I expected. I said I was an ex-Twitterer, having taken a deliberate decision to stop using it.
Around the same time as Clive Shepherd said he'd start using it as an experiment and see if it helped his learning and his professional life, I did the same. After some mishaps with Twitter-related software I settled on a side column in my browser. I tweeted daily, never more than one a day, and received interesting and friendly responses on occasion. Sometimes work-related, sometimes related to what I laughingly call my music 'career'. So what went wrong? The first uneasy feeling was a threat to my loyalty to Google Reader. My first 30-45m in a working day will often be reading commentary by people I respect. They would often say in their blogs 'Look at this' and take me off somewhere else. In no time, an hour has passed. I was already experiencing some tension about this, but Twitter blew the top off. It multiplied the 'Look at this' calls tenfold. All these TinyURLs leading to lengthy digressions. And some people I'd chosen to follow seemed to post one every ten minutes. One day I closed the sidebar in order to see something full-screen, and forgot to re-open it. Did I miss it? No. Going back after a day or two, a catastrophic flood of 'Look at this'.
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