Mashed Articles

Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies recently published a list of 100+ (e-)learning professionals who twitter. My twitter feed was on the list. This explained to me why I have suddenly been getting followed by all sorts of interesting e-learning heads from all different parts of the world.

The problem? My tweets were personal tweets, designed to feed into my personal blog. I’ve been intending to set up an e-learning twitter – two in fact. One for this blog, and a content-based feed for my Irish language site. I’d started twittering for my personal blog just to get a feel for how it worked, before doing it ‘professionally’.

Tony Karrer has since reviewed and slammed the tweets from Jane’s list as being ‘banter’ and not something he’d subscribe to. And underneath there are a lot of comments both in favour of Tony’s opinion, and against. I don’t really get the need for people to decide whether or not e-learning twitterers are good or bad, whether Jane’s list is useful or not. Try twitter. Like pistachio ice-cream, you can take it or leave it.

Personally, I’m a twitter convert. I love the way I can connect to people I don’t know but have heard of, and learn about their work flow, what’s interesting them, and get tidbits about their life. It helps me talk to them when I meet them face-to-face, or to reach out to them on email.

And I think twitter can really add something to my blog. I’m overwhelmed by the sites and tools I’ve discovered that I want to blog about. My backblog of really great sites I’ve been asked to review is weighing me down. So I want to use twitter to alert people to those great little tools or sites that I want to blog about, but either won’t find the time, or don’t need to write a long post about.

I don’t have a problem with anyone following the saga of my broken gas boiler as I twitter as michellegallen. But if you’d like to get the fewer and more relevant e-learning tweets, try following searchfindlearn at Twitter.