Twitter Tags
I have just found out how useful Twitter tags can be. I have for a while been a skeptic of the use of microblogging for Education and in general, for that matter, Although I am a believer in many aspects of social media (Web 2.0) and that it can in fact provide tools for the creation of authentic and collaborative learning environments and opportunities, the use of Twitter for irrelevant content such as “I am going shopping now” or “I need a new haircut” never impressed me.
Many might already know that there has been a gas outage in the Atlanta area for a couple of weeks now. With my car’s tank almost empty I decided to Google “find gas Atlanta” (without quotation marks) and was surprised to find this link with search results to the #atlgas Twitter tag. It impressed me that people are using Twitter for effective sharing of useful information besides trivial status updates, forming a network of like interests. I simply added the name of my city after the tag and found a few local gas stations that had just gotten a fresh supply of gas. I immediately used Twitteriffic on my iPhone to send people an update with the Google map of the location that had gas.
I would like to ask my colleagues that read my blog to help me catalog tags that are being used on Twitter for topics such as Instructional Technology, Instructional Design, Instructional Design and Technology (IDT), learning 2.0, social media and learning, virtual worlds in education, virtual worlds in general, etc.
Please reply to this thread as we might find some interesting information like I did today. 🙂
[…] It is Time to Tweak eLearning placed an interesting blog post on Twitter TagsHere’s a brief overviewI immediately used Twitteriffic on my iPhone to send people an update with the Google map of the location that had gas…. […]
That is very interesting. What kind of twitter tags do you use to find IDT content?
Not sure yet Brandon, that is exactly what I would like for some of our colleagues to help us with: gathering a list of IDT tags from Twitter (and maybe we could expand the concept later to search keywords that optimize the findings on search engines? – but that is a topic for another post). 🙂
[…] into to a searchable public database where what you type has potential to attract others of similar Twitter tags and interests. If you have a Twitter account and a Facebook profile, you can link the two so your […]
As well as tagging tweets on Twitter, you can use TweeterTags.com to tag your Twitter profile. The ideas is that you can then find, and be found by, people with similar interests. It’s a good way of building a community and making sure that you’re invloved in the conversation with the right people.
I’ve always been confused by the use of Twitter tags. This has helped me loads! Thank you for sharing!