Last night, I finally took the plunge with Twitter.
I happened to have with me my work laptop with several thousand student email addresses on it and thought what the hell and so I set up a work account and checked how many students were using Twitter (imported file in to a Gmail account – in case you’re wondering).
Interestingly, just over 1% of the students had twitter accounts registered from these email addresses (WOW because if anything I would have had this segment of students down as the least likely to engage with micro-blogging).
So anyway I now have an account where I’m following 200 people (most of the 200 aren’t active Twitterers) and so far eight are following me back.
How will I use this – I don’t yet know! It’s interesting just as another way of getting an insight in to students lives but I guess we’ll probably also integrate a news feed (maybe segmented).
What was interesting to me is the response it provoked.
I was a bit worried about some sort of backlash, that students might feel that this was too much of an intrusion.
However from the first responses it seems I shouldn’t have worried…
- First Twitter Response
For info my response was:
- First Twitter reply
[* Not sure of etiquette here - I wondered about blurring names in the images above but they are in the public domain anyway. Anyone have a view?]
Ultimately, I think this sort of route is inevitable but it has me worried, so you can guess how some of my more conservative colleagues would feel about this.
I guess I’m busy taking (and teaching colleagues how to take) small babysteps with technology whilst something like this would probably be considered a full-blown Olympic standard gymnastics routine by some of my colleagues.
One interesting thing that I did notice amongst my new found Twitter friends was how many people were saying that Plurk seemed like a much better / more popular platform.
So I started briefly looking at Plurk to see if the same thing could be done to gain a wider sample size.
It’s user base certainly isn’t as large and the Alexa comparison data doesn’t look too great yet – but I don’t think my new friends could be wrong, could they?
I guess I’ll investigate more tonight. For now I’d better get on with the day job.
