Thing # 5--Microblogging

Wow-- for 3 things ( Facebook, Twitter, and Back Channeling) that are so very simple and easy to signup for and use, there is a lot of reading and information about them. My husband (the geek) already had a facebook account for himself, but I was starting to feel the need to have one soon anyway. Mainly to keep up with family and friends. Almost everyone in my extended family had an account, so now I am officially on Facebook too. (Still need to get a good picture, though) Of course, I spent the usual next two hours locating old friends from high school and college, and family members out of state. Now that I am "in"-- I can see how it would really be an asset to have a class facebook account or twitter account for discussing topics, reviewing assignments, clarifying and answering questions-- especially being able to post pictures (appropriate of course). What is so nice about facebook is that you can limit who uses it and views it, so I think that would really work well for any group or class that needed to stay private or contained. They are both so much quicker to use, up to the minute real time, and seem much less cumbersome than communicating on a blog--if that is what you need.
Twitter and back channeling on the other hand lend themselves to just the opposite-- getting input and ideas first from within the group, and then growing to others outside. I really enjoyed the articles and discussions about using Twitter in colllege--and the legality of tweeting information.(I think that is how the rules say to state it-- don't want to sound like the newbie that I am!) Since my son will be going off soon, I had a particular interest in how colleges and professors were embracing some of these tools. I did have 2 interesting things happen when I signed up for Twitter. I saw all of the suggested 20 people to start following, and then too quickly went to the bottom to click the button-- not realizing that all of the boxes for these people were automatically "checked" and I was their follower-- like it or not. But the help button actually helped me to know what to do.
UNFORTUNATELY--you have to go into each profile and unselect them-- that took a while, but I decided it was worth it because I instantly had gotten at least 30 tweets from someone watching a sports game-- play... by... play....
FORTUNATELY--One of those checked was an astronaut for Atlantis, and he is doing a series of tweets for NASA about the next mission to the space station coming up Nov. 16th, and it had a nice You Tube video of "This Week at NASA". Something I can use. So I kept him on my list to follow-- getting rid of Kirstie Alley who was on her way out the door to go TP houses-- no joke!
I wish I would have had back channeling in some of my high school classes-- if you can believe it, I was fairly shy, and usually had good ideas to add to discussions, or had a question to ask, but really didn't want to speak up much-- also great for small or really large groups. I also like the idea of being able to back channel with a speaker or teacher so that they can use the questions or comments to guide the teaching or a discussion live or look at it to see what to focus on the next day...