Following up on the PLC communities discussion (can you tell today is my 23 Things "catch up" day) let us transition to Nings, Twitter, & Micro-Blogging. In many ways these seem to me a logical extension of many of the larger media we have been discussing throughout the class. But when many of these "micro" technologies are combined into a thriving community such as the Classroom 2.0, the result can be rather awesome and overwhelming.
I'd like to focus on plurk and twitter in this post. Twitter was something that I have come around to tremendously. Initially I held out the same antipathy towards it that I do towards Facebook/MySpace. What sold me was my other hobby, College Football. Several bloggers and commentators that I love to read host twitter accounts and post during games. Usually stray thoughts, comments on strategies, jokes and one-liners, etc. When I started following these during the games I was shocked at how much they ENHANCED rather than distracted my enjoyment of football (this is likely a result of how much dead time is in a football game as can be seen here). I know less about Plurk, but my perusals of it leave me with much the same feeling. A surprisingly cool tool.
Having said that, how does this transition into the Educational realm? I spent most of my last post discussing my particular needs in finding a PLC community. Rather than rehash all that I'll try to speculate how such media might enhance (or detract) from my (at this point hypothetical) PLC community. Given how useful I have found much of this class I want to keep an open mind. But in this case the nature of what I work with (large datasets, in depth infographics, dashboards etc.) do not appear at first blush to lend themselves well to microblogging in the same way that Wikis, Blogs, GoogleDocs and other 2.0 applications do. But even if they ulitmately don't, Twitter and I will always have college football.
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Well, at least there's football! But more importantly, you've discovered the advantages and usefulness of microblogging sites like Twitter and Plurk. Even though these tools may not have a place in your professional life, I'm pleased that their value as a tool is appreciated.
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