Twitter and PLN

I spent part of day trying out Twitter and thinking about how it might support a PLN. Here are my observations, based on one day's experience.

1. I like sites like eduratereview. All the material is related to education, and it is like a news feed. I could see checking into this one or twice a month and scanning for articles of interest. It gives a quick title, and then links.

2. "Following" is a very mixed bag. When most tweets are about something educational, they can have some value in that I hear about new resources. Like on willrichard45 (?), I found something that took me to his blog, and there I started to learn something about Diigo.

3. I was disappointed with the gardenglen link that Eric mentioned frequently. If I am following him to learn more about education and the web, there is too much unrelated to this on the page. My time is much more valuable than following several days worth of preparation to attend a conference. Moreover, all this garbage makes me respect the site and the person less. I think the idea of following is to find people who have interesting perspectives on something of interest to you. In a similar manner, I lose respect for people on a list serve who feel compelled to respond to all to answer a very specific question. Maybe for some, knowing that a person spends more time tweeting than doing yard work makes this person a reliable commentator on education. Personally, I like the more old fashioned way of evaluating a person by credentials and references within a community. To earn my respect, I would like to follow people who respect the value of time and use the short format of Twitter to relay conciseness.

4. I am learning I am a much more private person than many that exist on-line. I don't like the idea that others can see what I am following. I don't like leaving a very open trail because I worry how it can be misinterpreted. I don't think I would post openly to many blogs or twitter sites because I don't know how the information will be interpreted. As a teacher, I am especially sensitive to what people can find out about me because there are many who might question what I look at and form an incorrect image of me which could hurt me professionally. I think it is too easy to lose context when following a web trail.

5. Following another's tweets is weird and somewhat annoying because you see the replies to earlier messages so much of the page lacks context.

6. I wonder how much effort one needs to put in to evaluate all the people someone might be following. Because there seems to be no grouping, educational technology can be right up there with the person's community tennis team. For me, so far, list serves are more useful because at least there is some agreement about what people will post.