Last week students in my history class were told to sign in to twitter during an online conference on our schoolboard’s website. Throughout the conference students were able to tweet their questions and comments using our class’ hashtag. In all honesty I do not like the idea of tweeting in a group while watching something together. It was more difficult to focus since I had to keep switching from tab to tab on my brower. Add to that the fact that the conference was geared towards an older audience and my wednesday night was not very interesting.
Using the twitter backchannel was a new expirience for me. I have only just recently created my twitter account and I am beginning to realize that its less complicated than I had originally assumed. Tweet, hashtag, post. Its the basic steps tweeters use when participating on Twitter’s online community. Its fast communication for in the moment spontaniety and commentation. Twitter is more than a social networking site, its a community coming together to share information.
Although twitter has many benefits when it comes to group sharing the constant flow of information can be overwelhming. Keeping up with each post when every time you refresh your page five new posts are waiting to be read is difficult. Many people in my history class found the refresh time to be the most annoying and in some cases the only problem on twitter when using the backchannel.
Creating the hashtag was cool, it started off with just our history class using it but during the conferance #machs338 was trending for about 10 minutes. It was amazing to see how many people were involved with our tiny community (a history class).
A Teen Drama Queen 