(Update: AIBS staff member Oksana Hlodan blogged on the topic of "Twitter for Educators" on 9 Feb 2009 in her ActionBioscience.org Editor's Blog.)
Readers will see the new Twitter feed on this blog page and are invited to follow my postings about AIBS activities at https://twitter.com/AIBSbiology as well as here on this blog. Twitter is one more way to get news and views out to the biology community -- plus one can create 140-character messages much more readily than three or four more detailed paragraphs for a blog posting, so the two activities complement each other nicely.
An increasing number of scientific organizations are adding Twitter to their electronic tools for sharing and exchanging information -- for example, the Society of Systematic Biologists at https://twitter.com/systbiol and the NSF Biology Directorate at https://twitter.com/NSF_BIO. Professors are starting to use Twitter to extend discussions with students in and out of class, and there's this fascinating article in the 5 June 2009 issue of Time about the use of Twitter at scholarly meetings; the authors of that article write:
The Open Conversation
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact.
But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter.
At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.
When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you'll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.
Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
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