There is a new sensation on the Twitter social networking service. Its name is Mr. Tweet. The premise is pretty simple. You follow Mr. Tweet and eventually it will send you a message. The message is a based upon an analysis of who and what you follow with suggestions for others that you might wish to follow in order to grow your network.
Interesting concepts and I’ve had more than the regular number of people starting to follow me lately.
Now, I’m in the educational field but I don’t just necessarily follow teachers.
I follow some of the leaders in the social networking community. People like Jeff Pulver, Guy Kawasaki, Amber MacArthur, Robert Scoble, and so on. Why? These folks are on the cutting edge of all that’s new and good in social communications. I think that it would be a disservice to my attempts to understand the impact on education not to follow them. After all, not all great educational ideas originate in education. As such, their insights are so valuable to me.
As I noted above, I’ve been getting a number of new folks following me. Many of them are “Social Media Specialists” or “Social Media Gurus”. It seems to me that it’s obvious that Mr. Tweet has noticed those that I follow and recommend me to these folks.
I also use the Qwitter service. Unlike the Twitter service that lets you know when someone starts to follow you, this service lets you know when people stop following you and just what you said to turn them off! I notice that these folks often end up quitting when the discussion turns to education.
I think that’s a shame.
In education, we are the most social of communities. We brand everything and we’re forever selling. We also manage what we’re doing with some pretty hefty budgets. We learn from each other constantly and we share virtually everything. We’re insightful, we want to stay on the pulse of society, and we use the technology. We need you to join the conversation so that we can plan together for the future. After all, the future is in our classrooms every day.
Everyone can learn from education. Join us and don’t quit on us.
doug --- off the record 