Twitter in the Classroom or Workshop

I remember attending a project definition workshop that focused on a £20Billion project to establish the UK National Programme for Information Technology project – focused on health. The workshop held had representatives from many medical departments and was being facilitated by one of the regional suppliers. It was one of the key early sessions to establish the initial entity design for the underlying infrastructure. In other words, get this wrong then there could be major gaps further down the line in terms of resilience!

Although the session had an agenda, it suffered from the following issues:

1. Long sessions for each subject  – I could see the expressions on peoples faces, gasping for a water!
2. No time-outs
3. Simplistic use of note taking, for example: A list of issues parked on route on one flipchart rather than using consolidating techniques such as 6 hat or Yellow Post it. NB Over 26 attendees sat in a u-shape room layout and the room was very stuffy after the first hour.
4. Very quick introductions
5. Limited context outlined for the event
6. Other attendees who appeared as interested parties rather than main contributors
7. Loose agenda
8. Strategic importance not communicated
9. A dominance of resolution passing by a large number of supplier attendees
10. Low interaction between the attendees

The two latter items were of most concern. For example, at one point a resolution was agreed regarding the provision of data entities for the deaf. It emerged at the end of the workshop day that the attending representative of the deaf medical team felt shy about contributing. Maybe it was the facilitators responsibility or the structure of the day that contributed to this failing. Or, was it because sometimes people can feel it easier to communicate discretely!? Consider how vocal some people are by email and when you meet them in-person, they are as sweet as pie! It is almost as if they have a different personality or feel more liberated to speak their mind with the protection of the machine in sight, especially if you set-up a masked identification.

Using Twitter  could be one way of bringing greater contributions from the range of personalities in attendance at a typical project or discussion workshop, training session, classroom or website / development / test feedback session / webinar / discussion panel / public meeting.

A practical example can be reviewed here.

Twitter can support

Remote monitoring in the classroom or project workshop session – project #tags via a white board in the classroom
Remote monitoring for distance learners / Attendees – (see below for a list of on line tools)
Opening up discussion to students who would be reluctant to participate.
Collated writing notes can be posted later

The following on line resources can prove invaluable for getting people to engage either in public or via a protected name.

What the Trend?: Learn about what tags are currently trendy – suitable for research

Twubs: Aggregates tweets and imports pictures to help illuminate the topics being discussed.

Hashtags.org: Great at showing you its use over time and recent tweets.

Tagalus: A dictionary for hashtags.

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