Can we use Twitter in Learning? & Excuse: Vacation

SLACKER! Now that we have that out of the way, I really want to be more prompt on the posting. But (here comes the excuse) I was on vacation last week and was playing catchup the last few days of this week. Soooo, here I am finally posting. But I think you will find this one particularly interesting.

I was talking with a friend about his time up in Seattle at Gnomedex, THE conference for serious bloggers. He mentioned that it is a tough conference to present at. My initial thought was, WHY? You have a bunch of bloggers and technogeeks who love this – isn’t everyone feeding off of each other? Yes they are, but not in the way I thought.

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He mentioned that as the presenters were up doing their magic, everyone was on their laptops/phones, etc. They were listening, but they were also using Twitter to communicate about the presentation real time. So as the presentation is going on, there is another conversation happening simultaneously in the audience. As the presenter speaks, they critique the words/concepts and lobby them back and forth using Twitter. They debate among themselves, cross check information and refine the presenter’s material. By the time question and answer period starts, they have all asked the basic questions to each other and refined them and really boiled down to some pointed issues. Those are the questions they ask the presenter, and it sounds like it almost tears him apart. By this time the intial questions have been asked, debated and refined. Only the real difficult questions are left.

What was the audience doing? Learning in double time. We can guarantee that they learned more in that session with Twitter than without.

Given that, how can it be used in other situations for learning? To tell you the truth, I have not thought about it enough. My guess is that it is limited, but there are some niche area where it could help.