Tools: Should You Twitter? Some Mini-Case Studies

Here in the SCUP office, we have found instant messaging to be an amazing useful and core communications tool. We are also experimenting a bit with Twitter, and also with Yammer (which has a little more security on it). That's why we found this article to be interesting:

As of October 2008, Twitter was used by more than 3 million people according to Twittr, a search engine for Twitter accounts.

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[and its used for academic planning:] “It’s become a very tight little community of members who bounce ideas off each other, share fun things, use each other for any sort of questions,” says Petersen. At Penn State, all that connectivity through Twitter eventually led to a daylong professional development event last August. The new Learning Design Summer Camp was almost entirely designed by this community.

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Twitter also has a small but growing following among the higher education web and communication community, as indicated by the early results of an online survey I administrated in October 2008 about different web services targeted to this community. When asked about their communication channels of choice to receive professional development information, 19 percent of the 540 responders (all professionals working in higher education), named Twitter as one.