An interesting use for Twitter
I’m at the EdMedia conference in Hawaii this week. Having a great time, various pics have been posted in various places.
One thing that’s been intriguing is that there are plenty of Twits here, and a screen playing a live Twitter feed of posts about the conference is on stage beside/behind each of the keynote speakers.
In one way it’s quite distracting, and makes it hard to focus on the speaker’s rhetorical flow. But in another way it’s very cool, because people are commenting live on the meaning they are making of the talk, adding references and ideas as well as making jokes.
We’ve had an excellent series of keynotes, and in a sense each has been a counterpoint to the others, and with a number of people making those links and drawing those contrasts (rather than just me in my own head) the conversation becomes much richer.
I have a pretty good resistance to hype, and to ‘this new medium is going to transform learning’. And Twitter definitely isn’t. But in contexts like this, it *can* add something interesting, I think.