EDUCAUSE | twitter

Twitter service delays and problems

catherine — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:38:19 -0500

In May-June last year, there was noise in the Twitter and developer communities about delays and unreliable service from the popular microblogging platform. Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror suggested Twitter was a victim of its own success. Twitter fought back, working hard to deal with the service issues that its meteoric rise had brought. A year on, and the same or similar issues are bubbling up. Who or what was to blame: the management? the developers? Ruby on Rails?

Tim Bray suggested that, maybe, it's not the platform, it's the people. He may have a point: Twitter *is* attention hungry. Ravenous. And I would claim there are hard-wired cognitive limits to our ability to multitask -- at least, without seriously impaired task performance. For educators, this is a key issue. Past a certain point, intensive Twitter use should be read as primarily about maintaining social presence, not about information exchange. I take the point about the Twitteresque benefits of "early-warning systems" and Twitter's enabling of "distributed cognition", but I'd be very surprised if those affordances counted for anything more than an exceptionally small fragment of Twitter usage, day to day. There is always a tradeoff point where the attention cost that accompanies intensity of use negates the initial benefits of adoption. How many users have reached that point?

Twittterers seeking to prune their usage might like to check out Seth Godin's Email Checklist for suggestions. No, Seth's list wasn't written in relation to microblogging, and some of the points are not relevant, but it might make you think about the ways in which your time and attention is currently distributed across services and systems.

A few new podcasts of interest ...

mpasiewicz — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:07:36 -0500

NPR's Andy Carvin recently joined Talk of the Nation to cover social networking and sites like Facebook and MySpace. During the recording, they covered a number of issues related to their use in education.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14993512

First Monday is starting up a new series of podcasts. The current recording features an interview with Ian Bogost about his new book, Persuasive Games. Next up is Siva Vaidhyanathan ... I was forwarded a preview of the very interesting recording, but they haven't linked it up yet.

http://www.firstmonday.org/podcasts/

Twitter? Really?

jeffvand — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 07:52:51 -0500

Okay... I have been reading about twitter in all sorts of forums including Time Magazine the past month or so. Just like everything I do, I signed up and tried it out... but didn't see the point a couple of weeks ago. Well, it just won't go away, so I am going to try it again a little bit more.

I have embedded a twitter badge on my www.edutechie.com sidebar that I will attempt to update throughout the day with what I am doing. But I think the point of twitter is to make friends and follow what they are doing. So if you use twitter, please let me know so I can add you as a friend. Feel free to add me as a friend too. (http://twitter.com/edutechie) If you don't use twitter, feel free to sign up and use me to test it out with me.

So the real question is... how can we use this in education? Not sure yet... I'll let you know...