Uh-oh. Twitter.

Like many people over the age of 30, this writer is more than ambivalent about Twitter. Yet Twitter, or things like it, may well be real, live professional tools that we'll be using in 3-5 years. Sigh. But SCUP has been moving more and more into social media, and just from a couple of weeks of beginning to use Twitter, SCUP staff have seen some potential.

This EDUCAUSE Quarterly article sort of hints at some of what we have been thinking and observing, too. Speaking of last year's EDUCAUSE conference, the authors, Joanna C. Dunlap and Patrick R. Lowenthall, are both from the University of Colorado, Denver, note:

At a lively “debate” (“debate” because ultimately both debaters were fairly pro-Twitter), the negative commentary focused on three things: Twitter takes too much time, the content is of questionable value, and it promotes social (or, anti-social) myopic-ness. We do not disagree, but instead have found, as many have,2 that Twitter’s potential as a powerful instructional tool outweighs these negative factors. In this article we share some of the insights gained using Twitter as an instructional tool and explain why we think Twitter, despite its drawbacks (and really the drawbacks of social networking in general), can add value to online and face-to-face university courses.

BTW, you can "follow" "SCUP News" on Twitter here. At the moment we have 161 followers.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

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.