Eleventh Day of #ARU10Dot: What next?

Yes, I know this is 10 Days of Twitter, but I thought it would be useful to offer some suggestions about how you can continue to use Twitter in an academic context. An intriguing question is whether or not anything academically meaningful can be conveyed in 280 characters, when most academic publications are thousands of words long.

Here are some ideas as to how it can:

Tweet about new publications

These can be journal articles, blogs, website updates, etc. It is a good idea to have access to an online version of the full publication, or to an abstract, so that the tweet can point somewhere for followers to get more information. By providing the link via certain shortening services (e.g. bit.ly) you can gauge interaction with your publications.

Tweet about relevant new developments

You could inform people about new government legislation, relevant publications or activities by other organisations in your research area. This could aid your own work in several ways such as by increasing your collaborative network, raising interest in your research area and perhaps leading to greater funding opportunities.

Use Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to make your area of interest, and the materials you produce more visible. You should not hold back about creating your own hashtags if no relevant ones exist, but remember what we covered on Day 6.

‘Crowd Sourcing’

Twitter is a great way of providing opportunities for ‘crowd sourcing’ you work, getting people to engage in and help you with your work is often possible. Some researchers have been successful in using Twitter to get actual funding.

New Audiences

Twitter is a very good medium for helping you to reach out to non-academic audiences, such as governmental organisation, business, NGOs etc.

Impact

Twitter can be used to as a metric for Impact, by collecting data on activity related to your project or work. Useful data to collect includes changes in:

• The number of followers you have
• The names of those who could be useful for future collaboration
• Invitations to write a publication or speak at events, which have come via Twitter
• Number of visits to your own publications via Twitter
• The number of Impressions your activity has generated

Publicity

Twitter is a great way to raise awareness of events your Organisation or Department may be hosting. You can then LiveChat the event to further raise awareness. Several of my colleagues monitor Twitter chat from events they can’t physically attend.

Communication

Twitter is of course a communication medium, but it can actually be of great use in keeping the members of the sub-groups within your organisation up to date with your activities. You can also use Twitter to communicate more easily with students, researchers and part-time staff who may not always be kept up to date with activities through normal channels.

Twitter and Blogging

These two forms of social media work very well together. It is a good idea to keep your blogs managed in such a way that the essential content of each blog can easily be tweeted.

The Future

Now you’ve learned to use Twitter as part of the #ARU10DoT community, it would be great if we can sustain the conversations and the community around social media and academia at Anglia Ruskin.

The @AngliaLTA account for Anglia Learning & Teaching draws together information and conversations around learning, teaching and assessment at Anglia Ruskin. Keep following for information about activities and events on this topic within the University and beyond. Do message us to ask questions, engage in conversations or draw our attention to anything you think we should know about!

There is a hashtag, #AngliaLTA, associated with the @AngliaLTA account for tweets about learning, teaching and assessment, and we hope you’ll use it to find useful information and also to tag your own tweets for others to find. You might want to save it as a search or set up a column in your Tweetdeck or Hootsuite platform to keep track of it.

I’ll still be around on Twitter as @markwarnes2 of course, tweeting about a wide range of issues to do with Higher Education.

I look forward to interacting with you in future – do keep in touch!

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Many thanks to @dr_tobe and @mdleast for letting me adapt their text for this post.

 

 

Tenth Day of #ARU10DoT: The Past and the Future

Twitter is ephemeral. Tweets are short, throwaway observations, which capture the present moment, flow past quickly and are succeeded by more recent and relevant ones. We’ve looked at a way to favourite tweets, and to bookmark the URLs they may contain, but once you’ve done this, why would you want to keep a tweet? Why would you want to tweet in advance, rather than in the moment?

The Past

You can scroll through your last few thousand tweets or so (which might cover quite a span of time, depending on how prolific you are) but searching and looking at hashtags won’t take you back very far, only a few days. And yet… although finding past tweets might be difficult, they can come back to haunt you. If you want to find a tweet, it might be quite tricky, and yet if you want a tweet to disappear, someone may be able to dig it up!

Deleting Tweets

Let’s look first at deleting. You can delete your own tweets, by hovering over it and using the option that appears below next to ‘reply’, ‘retweet’, etc. If you make a mistake in a tweet, it might be less confusing to send another tweet with a correction rather than delete one that people may already have seen. If you tweet something you shouldn’t… well, don’t! However, you can’t delete someone else’s tweets, so if they’ve already retweeted you, taken a screenshot, or archived the tweet using some of the options below, it might be too late!

But what if you want to keep tweets, either your own or someone else’s? Why might you want to do this?

• Perhaps a discussion on Twitter helped you to think something through, and you want to keep the discussion so you can work it up into a blog post, or integrate it into a chapter or article later
• Maybe there was a good twitter ‘backchannel’ of live-tweeting at a conference or other event, which you want to preserve either for yourself or others
• Perhaps you want to preserve a selection of good advice or observations on a topic, when you ‘crowdsourced’ – asked for suggestions on Twitter and got some great responses. You might want to keep and share them with others.

Tweet URLs

You can save a link to individual tweets. Each tweet has its own URL. You can find this by clicking on the tweet which will open a new tab/window for that single tweet which contains the URL in the Address Bar at the top of the page. You can copy and paste this URL, or save it, bookmark it, embed it in a website, or email it to people.

However, this might only be a convenient way to present tweets in some circumstances.

Your Twitter Data

If you want a copy of all your tweets, then Twitter can send you an archive of everything you’ve tweeted. Click on your More, and select ‘Settings and privacy’. In your ‘Account’ page, select Your Twitter Data under Data and permissions. You will need to enter your password to Download your Twitter data:

This is also where you can find the link to deactivate your account:

The Future

And what about future tweets?

You can schedule tweets to send themselves automatically later on. You can’t do this from Twitter itself, but will need to use one of the additional apps mentioned in Days Eight and Nine, so you may wish to leave this topic for later if you want to consolidate the basics first.

Although Twitter is a medium which captures the moment, there are several reasons why you might want to schedule tweets for a later time.

• If your following contains people in a different time zone who are most likely to be online in the middle of the night, and you want to catch their attention
• If you have collected a lot of links you want to share, but don’t want to overwhelm your followers with lots of tweets at once
• If you want to tweet repeated information, updates or reminders, perhaps about an event you’re organising, a blog or article you’ve written or a deadline for a job or funding opportunity, without having to remember to do it (I’ve made use of this frequently throughout this programme!)
• If you’re away or busy but want to keep some presence on Twitter

You can schedule tweets from both TweetDeck and Hootsuite. To schedule a tweet in TweetDeck, for example, write a tweet as normal, and then click on ‘Schedule Tweet’. This brings up a small calendar, where you can choose the time and date when you want your tweet to be sent.

If you don’t use TweetDeck or Hootsuite, there are other apps which only schedule tweets. You might try, for example, Twittimer or Twuffer or also Buffer (which works for other social media too). You can sign in with Twitter (or Facebook, or LinkedIn), and it will ask you for permission to access your Twitter feed. Once signed in, it will ask you what you want to share. Type in a tweet, and click ‘schedule’ or ‘buffer’. You will want to go to the ‘Schedule’ tab and set the time zone, and the day and time you want to tweet!

There’s quite a bit there to play with! Well, that’s the last of our Ten Days of Twitter, but don’t worry if you’re still catching up – so are others, and the conversation will be continuing on #ARU10DoT for quite some time, I hope! You might like to keep an eye on the programme hashtag and support academic colleagues as they learn how to use Twitter. I hope you’ve found the programme useful, and thanks for joining in! Keep tweeting!

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Digital Badge

See the Digital Badges tab at the top of the screen for more information.

Activity:  Today’s Digital Badge activity is to complete the Satisfaction Survey.

OR (if you think that’s just too cheeky!)

Post a 100-word reflective summary of your experience of the course and whether it has had any impact on your practice.

But…

If you’ve experimented with Twitter and decided it’s not for you, then I hope we’ve helped you come to a better understanding of what it is, and a well informed decision on whether to use it or not. If you now want to delete your account, it’s easy to do so. We encourage you to keep your digital footprint tidy!

 

Ninth Day of #ARU10DoT: Managing Information

If you’re choosing who to follow effectively, then your Twitter feed should be full of interesting tweets and links to webpages etc. which you might want to follow up on. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, lose track of it all, miss things and mislay things!

Twitter itself has a few features which can help you stay on top of all the information.

Likes

If you see a tweet which interests you and which you’d like to come back to later, you can ‘like’ it and it will be stored for you to return to. To ‘like’, simply click on the Heart icon:

When you want to look at your liked tweets, you will see them marked in your Twitter stream, but it’s easier to see them all together. If you click on the top tab with the profile icon and ‘Me’ you will see your ‘likes’ as well as your tweets, followers and following. Click on ‘Likes’ to view. When you like a tweet, the person who tweeted it is notified, which may help to gain you an extra follower, but it also gives them feedback on what others are finding useful.

If you set up a TweetDeck account yesterday, you can also add a column for your ‘liked’ tweets.

Search

You can also search for tweets, by username, hashtag or just by a keyword. The search box is at the top of the screen in the right hand corner, or you can use the #Explore button on the left-hand menu:

You can also organise the search results by top (most popular) topics, people, photos, or videos. Once you have searched, an ellipsis will appear next to the ‘search’ box:

If this is a search you might repeat regularly, click on this, and you can save the search so you don’t need to keep performing it – useful if you’re following a hashtagged discussion. You could also perform an advanced search using this icon – you can narrow down the tweets you’re looking for by word or by the person sending or receiving it, or by location.

Trending

In the right-hand column, Twitter will also show you what hashtags are popular at the moment. This may or may not be of much use to you! You can narrow the trends down by location, by clicking on the Cog Wheel in this box, but if you are networking at a national or international level, this may not be very helpful.

Curated Timeline Content

Whereas traditionally, Tweets appeared in your timeline in reverse chronological order (i.e. with the most recent at the top), Twitter now decides which Tweets you will find most important. Twitter will select ‘Tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline. We choose them based on accounts you interact with most, Tweets you engage with, and much more’.

Should you wish to disable this feature, you can do so by clicking on the ‘Star’ in the ‘What’s happening?’ box:

This will bring up a dialogue box where you can choose to ‘See latest Tweets instead’:

Moments

Moments are, according to Twitter, the best stories on Twitter, and can be found either in #Explore or by clicking on ‘More’. Moments are stories which, according to Twitter, are the best stories on Twitter. In essence they are headlines grouped by theme: News | Sports | Fun | Entertainment.

However, these stories are a blend of trending hashtags plus sponsored content from selected ‘partners’ (including Bleacher Report, Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, Fox News, Getty Images, Mashable, MLB, NASA, New York Times, Vogue and the Washington Post).

So there are a range of ways to stay on top of all the information that’s being shared with you by the people you follow.

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Digital Badge

See the Digital Badges tab at the top of the screen for more information.

Activity: Today’s Digital Badge activity is to save three searches and list them in the comments section of this blog, with a brief explanation for each.

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Extras

If you’re keen to explore further, you might look at the following tips, or you might return to them later on, when you’ve been using Twitter for a while:

Third party applications

If you’re feeling more adventurous again today, here are a few more third party apps which will help you curate all the links which people are tweeting about.

TweetDeck

If you explored TweetDeck yesterday, you may not have realised that not only can you add columns for lists of people, you can also add columns to follow hashtags. Click on ‘Add column’, and then choose ‘Search’. If you perform a search for a hashtag, you can add a new column to your TweetDeck which will now display all the tweets using that hashtag, whether you follow the people using it or not. This might be useful if you are following a conference hashtag or chat such as #AngliaLTA but don’t want to follow all of the people tweeting with this hashtag.

Pocket

Pocket is an application which saves any webpage for you to look at in more detail later, when you have time. It is a bookmarking tool – if you find a webpage via a link in Twitter (or anywhere else), you can save it to Pocket, and then return to it and the other things you’ve saved later on. Pocket is a web browser based service, meaning you can access it from anywhere and any device or computer. To create an account, you’ll simply need an email address, username and password. On your desktop computer, you can download and install it into your browser, so you can simply hit a button in your toolbar to save a webpage (how to install it depends on which browser you prefer to use, but Pocket will take you through the steps – it’s easy!). When you use Twitter in a browser with Pocket installed (and also if you have installed the Pocket app on your smartphone or iPad), then a ‘Pocket’ option appears alongside the other options of ‘reply’, ‘retweet’, ‘favourite’ etc. when you hover over a tweet containing a link, so you can save it right from the tweet instead of having to open the link and add it to Pocket from there. You can also access Pocket on the web, if you’re on a computer which isn’t yours, or where you can’t install it into the browser.

Flipboard

If you use a smartphone or tablet such as an iPhone, iPad or Android device, you could download an app which curates content from your Twitter feed, such as Flipboard. Once you have downloaded the app, you can connect it with your Twitter account (or other social media) and it will draw in the links that people share with you and display them for you. To find out more about Flipboard, and how to set up an account, see instructions in its ‘support’ section.

News.me

If you don’t have a tablet device, you can set up an account with news.me, which will deliver the main stories shared by the people you follow on Twitter in an email. To sign up, you’ll need to add your email address, and then connect it with your Twitter (or Facebook) account by clicking on the request to authorise this. That’s it!

Paper.li

Paper.li is an application which curates content from social media streams which you use (in this case, Twitter, but also Facebook, Google+ etc.). It then presents the links it’s found in an easy to read magazine form. You can share this with others (and it will tweet automatically on your behalf, but it is not recommended that you ‘spam’ your followers in this way!) but you can just use it to pick up the links you might have missed on Twitter by adding Twitter as a source.

You can create an account and log in to Paper.li using either Twitter or Facebook. Use Twitter in this instance, of course!

Eighth Day of #ARU10DoT: Managing People

Over the last seven days, you may have found that as you continue to use Twitter, you come across more and more interesting people to follow, and your following also grows exponentially. Keeping track of them all can be a challenge, and sometimes you will want to focus on certain groups of them over others, or check in on some people only sporadically. This is hard to do in the undifferentiated stream of tweets on your Twitter feed, where they are all mixed in together. Fortunately, there are ways to split up your Twitter stream and group the people you follow into separate groups, so you can keep an eye on their tweets as it suits you.

You might want to group the people you follow into any of the types that we looked at in Day Three. Some examples might be

• Colleagues or services at your institution
• Colleagues and peers across the country/world in a particular field
• Professional or funding bodies
• News accounts
• Social, personal or fun accounts

Twitter lists

Twitter has a feature which allows you to make lists of people – and you need not follow all of them to add them to a list. These lists can be private, so only you can see them, or they might be public so you can share them with others. I created such a list for the participants of this course on Day Two, so you could find each other on Day Three. You might create such a list for the benefit of others, for example, to bring together the attendees at a workshop or conference, students on a particular programme or module, or the top accounts on a particular topic which you recommend other people should follow. You can share a list by giving people the URL of the list page, or let them view the lists you’ve created on your profile, where they can subscribe to your lists too.

To create a list on Twitter, click on Lists in the left-hand menu:

Click on the ‘Create list’ button , and you will be asked to name your new list and add a brief description. This description will be very helpful if you now choose to make the list public, so others can find and subscribe to it.

You will now be invited to search for people to add to your list. You can also add people later, by clicking on their @name and going to their profile. Clicking on the vertical ellipsis (‘More user actions’) opens a menu containing the option ‘add or remove from lists’.

To view your lists, or those of other people, you can simply go to Lists, and click on the List to see only the tweets from the people in the list.

Blocking

While we’re on the topic of managing people, you can also block people, for example, if you are followed by a spam account or someone you don’t want following you. My Block List (accessed through Settings and Privacy) includes a variety of unwanted or undesirable accounts. As I’m not a fan of gambling, for example, I have blocked Bet365, 888Poker and Newmarket Racecourse. Some are musicians or authors who are trying to sell their products (if they were any good they wouldn’t need to stoop to this). Some of the accounts appear to be Twitter bots as it is highly unlikely that young girls who live in the US and don’t speak English are a) real and/or b) interested in anything I have to say! Others I block for political reasons. I have not actively sought out accounts to block – these are all accounts that followed me for reasons best known to themselves.

Muting

Sometimes muting an account is preferable to unfollowing or blocking someone. I am working on a script for a TV series but I’m not ready to think about submitting it yet – so I’ve muted TV Writing Festival until I need them:

In addition to muting people, you can mute tweets containing specific Words that are associated with content you would prefer to avoid (like ‘Brexit’ for example).

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Digital Badge

See the Digital Badges tab at the top of the screen for more information.

Activity: Today’s Digital Badge activity is to create a list and post the link as a comments on this post (e.g. https://twitter.com/MarkWarnes2/lists/famous-people/members). You might want to try making a list of your colleagues on Twitter, or perhaps one for the professional and funding bodies you follow.

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Extras

If you’re keen to explore further, you might look at the following tips, or you might return to them later on, when you’ve been using Twitter for a while:

Third Party Apps

The beauty of Twitter is in its simplicity as a platform. However, sometimes you need a bit more functionality. There are some third party applications created by other companies as add-ons to Twitter, to help you out with some of the things about Twitter which you may find a bit overwhelming. Some of them will need to be integrated with your Twitter account to drawn information from them, and to do this, you will need to grant them access to your account (you can undo this again from your Twitter account settings).

You might want a more convenient way to view different aspects of your Twitter stream, or even add in updates from other platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn together with Twitter, so your whole social media stream is visible in one place. To do this, you can use one of the third party applications that were developed to make Twitter easier to use.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is owned by Twitter, and is a good way to manage more than one account, if you have more than one (for personal and professional use, or perhaps an individual one and an official one on behalf of an institution). I am using Tweetdeck to tweet from @ARU10DoT, @markwarnes2 and also @AngliaLTA at the moment, without having to log out of one account and into another – and it’s easy to get confused and tweet from the wrong one! However, you can also use Tweetdeck to split your Twitter stream into columns divided by people. It will import any lists you have made on Twitter too.

You will need to create an account, with an email address and password. Once you have set up an account, you can connect your Twitter account(s). You can use it as a web-based application to access from anywhere, or you can download the Tweetdeck app to your computer (there is no app for smartphones or tablets). Tweetdeck is organised into a number of columns, and gives you a number of columns automatically, such as your timeline, your own tweets or your @mentions (tweets that mention you), and you can add new columns for the lists you create. You can also create new lists in Tweetdeck. Click on ‘add column’, and choose ‘lists’ (or any other column you want to add!).

You can do everything we’ve covered in Twitter on Tweetdeck too, including shortening URLs. Tweetdeck also makes some other things in Twitter a little bit easier. For example, when you retweet, it will ask you if you simply want to retweet or if you want to edit the tweet, as we discussed in Day 6. On Twitter, you need to copy and paste the tweet if you want to edit it, which can be fiddly; this does it automatically.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is similar application to Tweetdeck, but it allows you also to import other social media accounts such as Facebook, and it is also available as an app for mobile devices. You can sign up using Facebook, or if you prefer to keep Facebook separate from your professional social media use, you can sign up with an email address, name and password. It will then ask you to add your chosen social network accounts. You can then add streams of content similarly as in Tweetdeck, and tabs for the different social networks. Hootsuite has a quick start guide to help you set up your account.

The other bonus of tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite is that you don’t see the advertising ‘promoted tweets’ from companies you don’t follow!

 

Seventh Day of #ARU10DoT: Pictures and Videos

I’m sure that, by now, you will have noticed that your Twitter feed contains a lot more than just text! While Twitter is primarily text based, a picture, as they say, paints a thousand words. Adding an image to text makes it much more effective, and moving images are even more eye-catching.

By tweeting pictures you can share the atmosphere at a conference, or a keynote speaker, or a poster that you think your followers will find interesting, or the results of a group activity in a seminar, or the cover of your latest book!

Adding media to your tweets is very straightforward but is slightly different depending on whether you are using a PC or an app on a mobile device. There are restrictions, of course – pictures must be in a certain format (i.e. GIF, JPG or PNG) and cannot be bigger than 5Mb, and videos can only be a maximum of 512Mb and/or 2 minutes and 20 seconds long.

Mobile

The Twitter app is available for both iOS and Android devices and once you’ve installed it simply tap to create a tweet in the usual way.

You can choose to select a picture or video from your library, but you will need to give Twitter permission to access your pictures.

Alternatively you can choose to take a new picture or record a video from inside the app. To do this, simply tap on the blue Camera icon. Alternatively you can opt to tweet Live video, using the ‘Live’ button. However, you will need to give the app permission to access your camera and, if you want to record video, your microphone as well. Once you have added your chosen media, add a comment in the ‘What’s happening’ box and tweet.

PC-Based

Accessing Twitter via a PC restricts you to selecting from your media library:

Simply click on the Media button, browse to your picture, and pick the one you want to share.

In addition to photos and videos, you can also add a GIF (a short animation), or include a simple Poll. You can also allow Twitter know your Location.

Third-party Applications

Many apps allow sharing to Twitter and other social media platforms. The image sharing app, Instagram, for example, offers the ability to share content to external apps, including Twitter:

Video Autoplay

The default setting for video tweets on Twitter is to play them automatically as you scroll through your feed. If you want to change this, you can do so in More -> Settings and privacy -> General -> Data usage:

While you might not feel the need to disable video autoplay on a PC, you might have different ideas about mobile devices, where the default setting is to autoplay videos using either Wi-Fi or mobile data, whichever is available. Video content can eat into your mobile data so, if your package only has a limited data allowance, you might want to switch to ‘Use Wi-Fi only’ or even disable autoplay videos completely.

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Digital Badge

See the Digital Badges tab at the top of the screen for more information.

Activity: Today’s Digital Badge activity is to tweet a picture. Take a picture of your desk, your colleagues, your building, anything you like, and share it with your followers. If you need inspiration then look at the pictures that the people you follow have tweeted. Just make sure you use the #ARU10DoT hashtag so we can call see it. And, if you’re feeling adventurous, there’s always video…

 

 

Digital Badge Update Week 1

Hi all!

I have produced a table showing what I have received from you all for last week’s activities:

Username	Day 1: Post Username on Blog	Day 2: Joining in	Day 3: Following People	Day 4: @messages	Day 5: Retweets
@anglialta	Y	Y	Y	Y
@JRFoxJoannaFox1	Y	Y	Y	Y

Please let me know if you think I’ve missed anything, please send a screenshot of anything I’ve missed as where you posted it – I’ll just claim a senior moment!

Don’t worry if you still need to fill in the table, though – there’s plenty of time to catch up!

Happy tweeting!

Sixth Day of #ARU10DoT: Hashtags and Trending

Hashtags (using the hash symbol #) is where Twitter really gets interesting. Today is therefore a little more complex than usual, apologies! The hashtag is, like the @message, a feature that was developed by early users of Twitter, and was taken up and integrated into the platform as it was so useful.

Basically, the hashtag is a form of metadata. A # in front of a word signals that it is a keyword of some sort, tagging that tweet with a hash symbol (hence hash-tag). This means that you can easily search for all other tweets by other people containing that word similarly marked with a hashtag symbol. In fact, you don’t even need to search – if you click on any hashtagged term, it will search for you.

The hashtag for 10 Days of Twitter is, as you will know by now, is, #ARU10DoT. You can therefore search for any tweets containing that hashtag, whether you follow the people using it or not. It’s how I found out who was participating in 10 Days of Twitter on Day 2 when you sent a tweet with the hashtag in, and any tweets you’ve sent since using it.

If you’re a Mac user and wondering where your hashtag key is, you need to press the alt key and the 3 key together to make the # symbol!

A hashtag needs to be a single word, preceded by a # symbol, with no spaces or other characters. It doesn’t need to be a real word – it can be an acronym of some sort, like #ARU10DoT, and it needs to be understood, known or guessed by the people it’s relevant to. It could even be several words run into one (which counts as one word!) such as #ILoveTwitter (it can help to capitalise the individual words to make it easier to read). What it should be above anything else, though, is short, so that it doesn’t use up too many characters!

How do you know what hashtags to use, or to search for? You make them up! If you’re creating a new hashtag, it’s good to do a search first and check if it’s been used before, and if it has been used before, whether you are going to use it in a similar way for similar people. If so, you’re joining a larger, pre-existing conversation! If not, then you might be confusing things, with a hashtag meaning different things to different people. If you’re talking to a limited, known group, as I am here, or as you might at a conference, then the hashtag might be meaningless to outsiders (which is probably fine – people for whom it’s relevant will probably be aware of it already or easily figure it out). If you’re creating a hashtag hoping to start a larger discussion which is open to anyone, then it needs to be self-explanatory and something that someone might very likely search for or guess, like #highered.

You’ll see people using hashtags you might be interested in when scanning your Twitter feed, and if you click on the hashtag, you will find all the other tweets using that hashtag recently.

Hastags in Academia

Hashtags really come in useful in academia in three ways.

An open, extended discussion

Someone might start a discussion about a topic on Twitter which is open to all to contribute, and it is drawn together using a common hashtag. You can also use it to gather responses. #OverlyHonestMethods is an amusing way for scientists to share the real thinking behind their methods, and give the public an insight into how science is done. #TweetMyThesis challenges you to sum up your research in 280 characters!

You might also be interested in other hashtags for education.

Livechat

A live chat is a conversation on Twitter which takes place in real time. A topic, time and a hashtag is agreed by the leaders, and they are joined on the day by people who want to talk about that topic with each other. Live chats can be fast and furious, but a great way to discuss, make new contacts and share experiences. Popular ones which you might be interested in are #PhDchat and #ECRchat, which deal with the experience of being a PhD student or postdoc, and might offer some moral peer support! The Guardian also hosts live chats on a Friday, on #HElivechat. Search for the hashtags to see what was discussed last time, and join in the next one!

Live-tweeting

To live-tweet an event means to tweet about it while you’re actually participating in it. Conferences or seminar presentations are often live-tweeted. This may be done in an official capacity, with organisers inviting participants to live-tweet the papers, giving attendees a pre-agreed ‘official’ hashtag to use, running up to the event, during and after, to find out who’s going to be there, what the papers were about, and any follow-up questions.

A live stream of the tweets at the conference may even be displayed alongside the speaker on a ‘tweet wall’, using a tool such as Hootfeed, such as this feed from the 2015 Learning and Teaching Conference, using the hashtag #LTAConf:

• If you’re at a conference, live-tweeting it is a great way to connect to other attendees. It’s easier to approach someone when you’ve been ‘talking’ to each other already on Twitter, and if you’re at the conference on your own, you can find people to hang out with
• By live-tweeting the presentations, you alert people who aren’t present that you are there, so they can find out more from you later if they couldn’t attend the conference, or were in a parallel session
• You can let your followers know who was presenting, and a brief insight into what the papers were about – if it sounds interesting, then your followers can look up publications by those people
• You can ask questions or for clarification from the presenter, from other conference attendees, or in fact anyone on Twitter, during the sessions. You can also enhance what the presenter is saying, with links to more information and comments on their presentation. Live-tweeting is very visible, so do keep comments professional
• It’s a way to continue conversations, perhaps with the presenter themselves, after the conference has finished
• People following the live-tweeting from elsewhere can still participate in the conference, addressing questions for the speakers via tweets. This is especially effective if the conference is also being livestreamed on the web, with live video and sound
• Presenters themselves might find the tweets useful feedback, to see how people have responded to their paper

However, live-tweeting events must be approached sensitively and professionally. Some presenters may feel that the conference space is a closed group, and feel uncomfortable with their paper being conveyed outside the room to those who aren’t there. They may worry that their ideas and words are being misrepresented in 140 characters. It can also be quite distracting to see people typing away and surfing the internet when you’re presenting, even if it’s relevant!

If you are live-tweeting, then do:

• check with the organisers and presenters that it’s ok to live-tweet (although, these days, its mostly taken for granted if not actively encouraged)
• alert your followers that you will be live-tweeting so they’re not confused!
• make sure you tweet professionally – be polite and respectful! It will be very visible if you are being unpleasant about a colleague or peer
• ensure that you reflect the speaker’s words as accurately as you can, and make it very clear, as with live-tweets, that you are conveying someone else’s words

Trending

When you hear the phrase ‘trending on Twitter’, it means that there are a lot of people talking about the same thing, using a common hashtag. Trending hashtags are also displayed on the right-hand side of the page:

Note that not all the trending topics have a hashtag. Note also that this is a list of ‘Trends for you’, which means that Twitter has chosen topics that it thinks you will be interested in (sometimes I’m not even entirely sure what half of the topics actually are!). To turn off the Twitter suggestions, click the Gear Wheel, which brings up this dialogue box:

Unticking ‘Trends for you’ reveals that the only other choice is location-based trends. Try picking different locations to see trends around the world.

Trending is Trending

The term ‘trending’ has become so widespread in society that it is now frequently used as a synonym for popular. Facebook, for example, introduced a Trending element some time ago but abandoned it. However, Netflix is still using theirs:

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Digital Badge

See the Digital Badges tab at the top of the screen for more information.

Activity: Today’s Digital Badge activity is to post a hashtag of a conversation you’d like to join in the comments section of this blog post.

You could even experiment with live-tweeting an event, no matter how small (could even be a TV or radio programme!)

If you find any good hashtag conversations, let us know! And remember to tag them with #ARU10DoT!

 

Week One of #ARU10DoT

We’re halfway through the Ten Days of Twitter – I’m really glad so many of you have joined us, and hope you’re finding it useful and fun! Thanks for all your participation. I’ve made several new acquaintances on Twitter, and will be following you for all

If you’re following along but haven’t tweeted yet, or if you’ve only just found the programme, it’s not too late to join us! Send me a message as in Day 2 with my name @markwarnes2 and the hashtag #ARU10DoT, and I’ll add you to the list of participants on Twitter that we can all view (see Day 3), to see who else is participating.

Don’t forget to complete all the daily tasks if you want to qualify for a Digital Badge!

 Have a great weekend, keep tweeting, and I’ll see you on Monday for Day 6!

Fifth Day of #ARU10DoT: Retweeting

You’ve send a few tweets over the last five days – hopefully you’ve found plenty in your everyday routine as an academic which would be of interest to others, whether they are your Anglia Ruskin colleagues, peers in your field, other professions within or beyond Higher Education, such as policy, journalism, or publishing, or to the general public.

But it really would be hard work to generate all the material yourself to feed your followers with regular, interesting tweets! Fortunately, you don’t have to – you can retweet the tweets of others. It’s sort of like forwarding an email, but to everyone who’s following you. They see the content of the original tweet, who it came from originally, and perhaps also a contextualising comment from you. By doing this, you’re performing a valuable service:

• to your followers, by sifting the stream of information available to them, filtering out what’s potentially interesting to them, and also by making them aware of potential new contacts they can add to their network. They may already follow the person you’ve retweeted, in which case you’re bringing their attention to something they may have missed the first time. They may not yet follow the original tweeter, in which case, you’ve made available to them information they may not have had access to, and given them a new contact to follow.
• to the people you follow, by amplifying their message and spreading it outside their network (and also possibly putting them in touch with new contacts)
• to you, by displaying to others that you’re well connected to interesting and important people, and that you are a discerning judge of what information is interesting and significant!

I’ve been retweeting items I hoped might be of interest to you and my other followers on @markwarnes2 over the last week. To retweet a message, you simply click on the ‘retweet’ button which appears below each tweet when you hover over it.

The message will then appear in your followers’ Twitter streams as if it appeared from the original sender, even though they may not follow them (although they might!). The tweet that they see will be marked with ‘username retweeted’ in small lettering, so if they look, they can tell that it was you who retweeted it.

However, you can edit the tweet before retweeting it:

Adding a comment alters the appearance of the retweet on your news feed, and Twitter embeds the original tweet below your comment:

Also, apps like Hootsuite or TweetDeck (we’ll look at these later on!) give you the option to quote and edit, or just retweet. This makes the tweet come from your account, rather than the original sender, making it clear that it’s you who has chosen to pass this information on.

Remember that to use Twitter effectively to promote your own work, you need to update frequently with interesting content to gain a following, and you also need to reciprocate and promote the work of others. No one wants to read or retweet a Twitter feed which is just broadcasting announcements about itself!

So – have a look at your twitter stream and see if you can find tweets you think your followers might be interested in – funding opportunities, calls for papers, an item of news, a new blog post, or publication someone’s tweeted about, a comment you agree with… and start retweeting!

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Digital Badge

See the Digital Badges tab at the top of the screen for more information.

Activity: Today’s Digital Badge activity is to edit three tweets to add #ARU10DoT and retweet them

 

Fourth day of #ARU10DoT: Sending @messages

You’ve sent some tweets, followed people and hopefully gained some followers of your own. Some people prefer to listen more than they tweet, which is fine – the only thing to consider is, the more you say about your interests and interact with others, the more people will know what kind of information might be useful to you, and direct relevant things your way. It’s a way of fine-tuning your Twitter feed as well as providing useful information to others.

Sometimes you might want to address a tweet to someone – it will be visible to other followers, but you want to catch a particular person’s attention with it. This might be because:

• you are replying to or responding to one of their tweets
• you are asking them a question
• because you think they might be particularly interested in the information passed on in your tweet and want to make sure it catches their eye
• you mention them in a tweet and want them to know, for example, if you retweet one of their tweets, or are talking about their work

It may also be that you don’t follow that person, or they don’t follow you, but you still want to catch their attention with one particular tweet: they will still see it if you include their @username

For example:

• Hey @markwarnes2, enjoyed your presentation! Do you know @ginawisker’s work on this subject?
• Giving a talk at your uni next week, @markwarnes2 – are you around for coffee? Would be great to meet up!
• Great resources on using social media in teaching – of interest, @markwarnes2 – http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/teaching/social_media.php?section=using
• I recommend this too! RT @markwarnes2 – a good read on developing students’ digital literacy – https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-students-digital-literacy

To call someone’s attention to a tweet with an @ mention, you use their username or ‘handle’ preceded by a @ sign. For example, to let me know you’ve mentioned me, you would include ‘@markwarnes2’ in the tweet. If you click the ‘reply’ option which appears in grey in each tweet, Twitter will automatically insert the person’s @name into your tweet (we’ll look at the other options that appear in each tweet later!)

This is another reason to keep your Twitter name as short as you can – it uses up some of the 280 characters! This is a feature that originated with the users of Twitter, which was then subsequently designed into the platform. It’s what has turned Twitter from a broadcast medium of updates into a conversation, and that’s Twitter’s real strength.

Note – as the @ sign is reserved for marking people’s handles, you can’t use it as an abbreviation for ‘at’, for example, ‘let’s meet @6pm @cafe’ – it will treat these as an @message, and it’s likely that someone, somewhere, will have chosen @6pm or @cafe as a handle!

A small but important point is where you place the @username. If you are responding to a tweet, using the ‘reply’ button, then Twitter will automatically begin your tweet response with the @username, and you can then type the rest of your message. However, if the very first thing in the tweet is someone’s @username, then only that person and those who follow both of you will be able to see it. If you want the tweet to have a wider audience, then you either need to put a full stop in front of the @ sign like this: .@markwarnes2 OR you could include the @username later on in your tweet as part of the sentence, for example: ‘reading @markwarnes2’s blog post about Twitter – some useful tips!’

Why might you want a wider audience to see conversations between you and another user?

What’s in it for them?

• It’s polite to acknowledge them if you’re retweeting something they’ve said, or to let them know if you’re commenting on their work
• You are drawing attention to them and their work to people who don’t already follow them – they get publicity and new followers

What’s in it for you?

• You gain a reputation as a polite, helpful, knowledgeable and well-connected professional
• You may also gain new followers or make new connections

What’s in it for your followers?

• They get to know about someone’s work which they may have been unaware of, and a new person to follow
• They are offered a chance to contribute to the discussion too, and thereby gain new contacts and audiences
• If replying to someone who’s passed on useful information to you specifically, it’s helpful to copy in their reply to your tweet response, in case your followers are also interested in the information.

To see @messages directed at you, click on the button called Notifications marked with the bell icon, on the menu on the left of the screen.

They will also appear in your Twitter stream, but you may miss them there! Depending on your settings, you can also receive an email when someone @messages you. To set your account to email you when someone mentions you, click on Settings (accessed via your Profile Picture at the top) and then ‘Email Notifications’ in the left hand menu. You may wish to edit the Email Notifications anyway as the default settings may include things you don’t want or need.

Of course, there may be times when you don’t want a wide audience to see the interaction, if it’s not going to be understandable out of context, or of interest to them but just cluttering up their feed, and in these cases, you can just start the message with ‘@’.

Remember that Twitter is a very public medium, and whether you @message someone or not, your tweets will be visible to anyone who views your profile.

Direct Messages

If you really want to send a message to just one person, but don’t want it publicly visible to anyone else, Twitter allows you to send them a DM or Direct Message, but only if that person follows you. Direct Messages on Twitter operate in the same way as other direct messaging systems, such as Facebook Messenger, for instance.

If you want to practice sending a Direct Message, feel free to contact me! If I’ve accidentally omitted to follow you, let me know!

So – send some @messages to people you follow – ask them a question, draw their attention to something, comment on something they’ve tweeted! Reply to anyone who messages you, to be polite, if they appear genuine and professional.

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Digital Badge

See the Digital Badges tab at the top of the screen for more information.

Activity: Today’s Digital Badge activity is to send me an @message to tell me how it’s going @markwarnes2