Lesson 6 Microblogging part 5: Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook

Twitter walls are very common on conferences and other events. It adds to the social experience of the event to see and share comments on the Twitter wall. But Twitter feed can have more ambitious functions:

• The participants can make a silent or spoken agreement to share their notes on Twitter using a session or topic specific hash-tag
• The participants can view the stream from parallel sessions in real time and have grounds for a decision of session switch
• You can view the notes of the parallel sessions afterwards
• You can follow the conference events in real-time even if you are thousands of kilometres away

MindTrek Conference 2013 Twitter wall.
Photo copied from Tweet by @lecklin (Tuomas Lecklin)

I have tested use of Twitter at conferences with my students at some occasions. Some students love it. Some students hate it. Some students enjoy following the stream, but find it very hard to follow the conference producing simultaneously notes for Twitter.

If you want to have a look on how hash-tags worked at last European Youth Award (EYA) festival check this.

And here's one example how to utilize Twitter feed: I have on many occasion composed blog posts using the Twitter feed of my students. Here is an example from EYA 2012.

Engage the experts

Apple founder Steve Wozniak interacting on-line with
MindTrek 2013 participants.

Many professonals are active Twitter users, and some of them like to interact and share. You loose nothing by giving a try asking the experts. The example here Woz replying to @Lecklin is from an arranged situation, where Stewe Wozniak had promised to answer questions, but I've seen other situations where my students have asked and the expert replied on Twitter.

TAMK Media student Tuomas Lecklin was very happy Steve Wozniak answered the question he made on Twitter on-line. You can see the six minute interaction on YouTube.

To collect data for our second research project
Our second research project studies the use of social media by #eurovision song contest fan communities, contestants, record labels and television broadcasters around Europe. Twitter is one of the main sources of research materials for the study.

The brief of the research project will be on this blog tomorrow.

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The lesson about Twitter, parts 1-5:
1. A general news channel (lists) published on April 7
2. A specific news channel (basic searches, using #)
3. A better search engine than Google?
4. A massive database
5. Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook (This story)