My notes on Boath, E., Vigurs, K., & Frangos, J. (2018). Twittering Away-Is twitter an appropriate adjunctive tool to enhance learning and engagement in Higher Education?. Innovative Practice in Higher Education, 3(2). Twitter has often be framed as a potential tool for teaching and learning. It can be used for virtual peer support groups, developing […]
Tag: twitter
My notes on What image types do universities post online? Twitter has become a mainstream activity for universities in the UK and the US, with most institutions now having a presence. The platform has taken an image based turn over the last few years, since native photo sharing was introduced in 2011 and Twitpic et […]
I’ve edited the final two paragraphs of this post for clarity because an awful lot of people read it and thought I was criticising quote tweeting rather than one particular use of it. Imagine you were sitting in a cafe having a conversation with a friend. You greeted each other warmly when they arrived, you ordered coffees […]
Contributors are invited to submit abstracts (about 200 words) toward our new edited collection *Twitter: Global Perspectives, Uses and Criticisms* to be published by Nova Science (New York). We are interested in new research and perspectives on, as well as criticisms of *Twitter communication*. Topics being covered (though not limited to these) include: · […]
Until Tyler Shores demonstrated it earlier today, it had never occurred to me that the wonderful Wayback Machine could be used to view the history of your social media feeds:
Over the last five years, I’ve managed a vast assortment of institutional social media feeds. These have included academic departments, research projects, journals, research networks, academic blogs and event series. I’ve included a selection of Twitter accounts I’ve solely or jointly managed below and I’ll show some of these in the session I’m doing at […]
How significant can a tweet can be? We can point to isolated cases of individual tweets going viral, creating controversy and producing material outcomes in the world. But isolated tweets rarely have such significance. Instead, we need to look at a Twitter feed as a unit of analysis, taking someone’s entire output on the platform as […]
Foremost amongst the guidance offered about Twitter is the claim that it is fundamentally a conversational platform. One shouldn’t simply ‘broadcast’. It’s for discussion and engagement. There’s an element of truth in this but it’s one which can be lost through repetition, as the status of received wisdom stops us from thinking critically about why everyone agreed with […]
This excellent essay by Jan-Werner Müller in the London Review of Books raises an important issue about the forms of political mobilisation facilitated by social media: Trump has called himself the Hemingway of the 140 characters. He has ‘the best words’. He loves Twitter, he says, because it’s like having one’s own newspaper, but without […]
This is apparently growing rapidly: why pay staff to do this when you can get desperate graduates to do it for free? Want to jump start a social media marketing campaign for your business but don’t have the time or social media savvy in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs or similar sites? Try this twist on […]
There’s a lovely reflection in Les Back’s Academic Diary, released soon by Goldsmiths Press, concerning the role of Twitter in academic life. He suggests that Twitter sometimes facilitates our “inhabiting the attentiveness of another writer” by providing “signposts pointing to things going on in the world: a great article, an important book, a breaking story”. […]
In his fascinating book Spam: a Shadow History of the Internet, Finn Brunton offers an example on pg 23-24 of how the early ARPANET was local in a way that is no longer the case. in September 1973, computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock used his ARPANET connection in Los Angeles to get back the electric razor […]
In a number of books, Nikos Mouzelis offers a really important critique of the tendency to equate ‘micro’ with face-to-face and ‘macro’ with impersonal and international. He cites an international summit, Yalta if I remember correctly, as an example of a face-to-face encounter that is very much macro. I was thinking about this when reading […]
Comparing the follower counts for Twitter feeds based on the 2014 REF results (i.e. I mean ‘top’ in a very narrow sense) and an unsystematically chosen selection of the Twitter feeds I’ve been scrutinising this morning as I finish off the book. Oxford University: 231,000 Cambridge University: 200,000 Shit Academics Say: 129,000 Nein Quarterly: 114,000 Lego Academics: […]
This is a very interesting trend, though one I suspect could lead in some unfortunate directions: Ever been the victim of plagiarism on Twitter—or, dare we say, the shameful purveyor of it? The social network seems to be putting an end to those pirated tweets by cracking down on users who steal jokes to inflate their […]
Some useful resources: A storify of the hashtag If you don’t have social media, you are no one: How social media enriches conferences for some but risks isolating other The Academic Twitterazzi An idea is a dangerous thing to quarantine Tweeting out loud: ethics, knowledge and social media in academe Some live tweeting policies and […]
This useful post on the Pickle Jar blog offers some pointers about effective live tweeting. I agree it’s important to remember that most (?) people reading your live tweets won’t be in the room with you and thus will be confused by any features of the context you take for granted in your tweets. In […]
Thanks to Neil McGuire for including this in his workshop introduction yesterday. It’s excellent:
A few years ago when I was running the Twitter feed for the Sociology department at Warwick, I noticed how readily first year undergraduates tweeted practical questions to the account during their first few weeks of the first term. Students tweeted questions intermittently throughout the year but it was particularly marked at the start of […]
In four years of using Twitter regularly, I’ve often found others tweeting things that resonate with me and vice versa. In fact one could plausibly suggest that these experiences play an important role in making continued use of the service appealing. What do I mean by ‘resonate’? I mean knowing where someone is coming from, understanding the […]
