[Air-L] [Spam:5.3 SpamScore] Air-L Digest, Vol 63, Issue 29

[David Jones]

Interesting discussions so far. We use Twitter as a primary communications
stream among some of our professors and PhD students at Old Dominion, and it
works wonderfully well for the most part. It's flexible in a way I don't
think FB statuses can be. Sure, you can use to it update people about
relatively mundane, everyday parts of your life. But, given its ties to
other services, I think it has so much potential to be a powerful
communications stream. It has an inherent ability to quickly network
different media, services, and people on an ad hoc basis (a la the Iran
elections situation). For me and my fellow doctoral students at ODU, it's
allowed us to network with people who have similar research interests
outside of ODU.

The real power behind Twitter comes when you work through a third-party
client that allows users to quickly access some of the other services that
network into Twitter, like Twitpic. Tweetdeck is a pretty popular app
amongst me and my fellow students. It's quick, flexible, and it has a
drag-and-drop feature for images and links that often comes in pretty handy.
We've taken to using hashtags to organize tweets into class and
organization-specific streams. We track conversations about reading
material, research interests, etc. And we use it as a way to disseminate
links to information and longer conversations that might happen in other
spaces.

As someone said earlier, the one annoyance I've found is the overwhelming
number of bots and spam.

Dave Jones
Old Dominion University
djone111 at odu.edu