Cross-posted on CELT News: http://kcelt.blogspot.com

I just concluded a talk about Twitter with the Keene State College Computer Science Department and am feeling pretty positive about their direction. It’s exciting that they’re engaging in this conversation; they asked honest questions about social networking in general and Facebook versus Twitter more specifically. We discussed how the purpose of environments (intensely social in Facebooks case) can dictate the success of classroom adoption and how it’s critical for faculty to show the utility of less social, less used (with this demographic anyway) applications such as Twitter.

We covered a lot of ground in 60 minutes but we landed on a few keys for Twitter rookies :

#1) PLN – Personal Learning Network
Use Twitter as a personal information aggregator by following great thinkers. I shared with them a tweet from one of my favorite bloggers/tweeter who had this to say about PLN’s.

“by far, my educator/professional Twitter network has been more immediately useful than any *offline* PD I’ve ever attended”

#2) Event Notification
Use tweets to inform your network about events such as the “Jelly” gathering at the Marlboro College Grad Center or to let folks know about job opportunities. New blog posts, workshops or brown-bag talks are also a great ways to notify your local network about important information.

#3) Lean on Your Network
Use your network to get answers, suggestions, or ideas. If your network are thinkers, doers, and participators, you won’t be disappointed!

#4) Levity
Follow Steven Colbert (stephenathome). Enough said.

#5) Build Out Your Network
This is probably the single most important advise that I can give anyone new to Twitter. Twitter is only as good as you network. It’s pretty easy really:

Social Bookmarking: A personal and group organization tool

Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious are powerful web 2.0 applications used for storing, sharing, and discovering web sites. We all know that finding valuable web resources takes time and it can be difficult to organize sites in manner in which they can be used at a later date. Delicious is a social bookmarking website (very different from a social networking site like Facebook) where the real utility comes when users find creative ways to leverage the collaborative nature of the web to build a community of practice. Join Betsy Street and Steve Bigaj as they discuss how they conceptualized and organized a Delicious site to share resources across the state for the Monadnock Center for Successful Transitions (MCST).

Date: Tuesday 9/15/09
Time: Noon
Location: Student Center 309

There is such an abundance of resources on the web that could be used to supplement courses that I thought the start of a new semester would be an ideal time to post the link to one of the richest video repositories on the web.  Technology, Entertainment, Design, (TED), http://www.ted.com features videos from leading thinkers in the science, education, business, technology, entertainment and other fields. Talks are organized by topics and include Larry Lessig ( on laws that choke creativity), Arthur Ganson (on kinetic art that explores deep philosophical ideas), Seth Godin (on marketing Ideas in the digital age), and Isabel Allende (on women, creativity, the definition of feminism and passion).

So when you have a minute or two poke around the site. You won’t be disappointed!

From TED:

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.

Sample Video: “Evan Williams: How Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses”.
From: TED: Ideas Worth Spreading