Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Week 10 - Twitter and Wrap Up

It's All Over But The Tweets

For our final assignment, we're going to join the wild world of Twitter. Twitter has been around since 2007 and seems to be increasing in popularity to the point where you can't go a day without seeing reference to someone's tweet, either good or bad.

Twitter is called a micro-blog by some, as it serves the same purpose: to share your thoughts with the world (or a select group of people). In contrast to blogs however, Twitter limits your posts (a.k.a. tweets) to 140 characters, which makes it tough for those who like to type and type and type. You'll see a lot of slang and shorthand notation on Twitter, much like with cell phone text messages.

While Twitter often appears to be dominated by celebrity feuds or banal details of daily life (a 2009 study of 2,000 tweets broke them down as Pointless babble– 41%, Conversational – 38%, Pass-along value – 9%, Self-promotion – 6%, Spam - 4%, News – 4%), there are some good uses for it. For example, TPL uses Twitter to promote upcoming events and it has been used in a number of emergencies like the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

For this week's assignment, please follow the At Your Fingertips - Twitter guide available on the TPL iNet under Public Service -> User Education -> 01 Programs -> TPL at Your Fingertips. At the end, please start following tpl23things, torontolibrary, and one more Twitter account of your choosing. The make a post on your blog about your experiences and thoughts.

And finally, congratulations everyone, you have successfully reached the end of the 23 Things journey. It's been a fun and informative 10 weeks, and I've really enjoyed developing and delivering this course to you. Let's recap what we covered:


* Creating a blog

* Posting to and editing your blog

* Creating a Flickr account

* Uploading photos to your account

* Adding photos to your blog

* Exploring various Flickr tools

* Creating a Bloglines account

* Locating RSS feeds

* Subscribing to RSS feeds

* Photo editing with BigHugeLabs

* Using generators for fun and ideas

* Tagging and exploring with del.icio.us

* Creating gmail accounts

* Creating a Google Docs file

* Collaborating on a Google Docs file

* Finding and subscribing to podcasts

* Adding YouTube clips to your blog

* Creating a wiki and adding pages

* Using Twitter

Not to mention all the exploring and discovery of new Web 2.0 tools that you undertook on your own. I hope everyone feels more confident about using these tools at work and at home.

For those of you still catching up on previous assignments, I will be monitoring the 23 Things e-mail account over the winter.

For your final task, please complete the evaluation form I've e-mailed to your GroupWise accounts and send it me in Planning, 3rd Floor, NYCL.

Thanks for being a great group.

Cheers,
Jonathan

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