SLATE 2012 LIVE TWEET EXPERIENCE

BACKGROUND

After completing AWSD and WASDA’s Amplified Administrators course taught by Brad Saron, I was excited about the culminating activity -  attending the 2012 Wisconsin SLATE convention and using Twitter to “live tweet” the convention with our hashtag: #ampedadmin.   Previously our class had spent a great deal of time creating accounts and learning how to navigate Twitter. We mined educational sites and set-up feeds using Google Reader and would tweet out items of interest to fellow class members at our leisure.

However, that was all in slow motion. I had not yet had the experience of trying to “live tweet” from a conference.  Nor did I understand what should be tweeted or how this was to be done in real time.  

I decided to “practice”.

A LEARNING CURVE

In early November, I was attending a “Convening Conference” sponsored by The Institute at CESA 1. They announced that the conference could be “live tweeted” using the hashtag  #C12012. I decided this was my opportunity. I usually use my computer to take notes, so I had a word document open. I decided to open Twitter on another tab. I navigated to #C12012 and saw that some people started tweeting the obligatory “Excited to be at…”, so I checked in with my bland “I’m here at the conference, too” statement, whatever it was, still not sure why anyone cared.

As the keynote speaker began, I noticed a number of people tweeting out some of the main points that were being made. Being a novice, I had a hard time juggling. When I heard something profound, I would diligently type it into twitter. But by the time I had reduced it to the 140 characters and included the hashtags, I had missed a ton of what the speaker was saying and seemed to be out of step with my tweets. I noticed there was a particular tweeter that seemed spot on and always beat me to the “tweet” with something more profound than I was going to offer. Meanwhile, I had lost some important points that I wanted to get down in my notes for further reference. After a bit of fumbling, it hit me. I still wanted to take some notes on my word document, but this would also provide an excellent source for me to quickly cut and paste items of interest into a “tweet”. I found this practice to work. I was less concerned about “getting something into twitter” and more at ease with the mechanics of going from one source to another. It still was a little overwhelming trying to keep up with the Twitter feeds, but I noticed that if I missed something that I wanted to quickly jot down, it was likely that someone would put it in a tweet within a minute or so. I was "getting" how this could be a source of “community notes” about the event.

TWEETING at SLATE 2012

Armed with my newfound technique, I was excited to be at SLATE and to get into the “buzz” of the twittersphere. I still liked the idea of having notes about things that I found important, but wanted to know what other people thought was important, too.

Logging into #SLATE2012, I found a number of classmates who had “checked in”. At this conference of over 500 people, I immediately felt as though I was with a number of friends, even though I had not actually seen any of them yet.  It was interesting to read the tweets during the keynote presentations, as we were all hearing the same thing but commenting from our own perspectives. Equally interesting was during the break-out sessions. I could gather information from a number of different sessions beyond the one I was attending based on the tweets being sent out by others. It was amazing how much more information I was able to come away with than I had been able to at other conferences I had attending without tweeting.  I felt much more like a participant.

There were a number of important things that I experienced due to “live tweeting” at this conference.

-          Access to resources – Speakers often talked about certain resources during presentations. Invariably, someone would tweet out a link to the resource the speaker was talking about. I found many useful links this way and also found myself “Googling” sources and tweeting them out for other people.
(Example tweets: Julie Mathiesen talking about free on-line textbook resources http://www.ck12.org/  #slate2012 #ampedadmin, WI Digital Learning Day - Feb 6 https://sites.google.com/a/dpi.wi.gov/wisconsin-digital-learning-day/ …#slate2012 #ampedadmin)

-          Better resources than the presenter – In some cases, issues that the audience had brought up were addressed better by tweets from the audience than by what the presenter was able to offer.  This truly shows the power of a network. Obviously, presenters are prepared for certain things and can easily be put on the spot if questions go in a different direction. However, audience participants have vast expereinces and resources that can be easily shared through this format.

-          Learning about people’s passions – It was exciting to see what drew the interest of the crowd and whether it matched what I was thinking. Here was a tweet that was sent both by me and one of my classmates:  Ruston Hurley: “You have my permission to innovate WILDLY”

-          Colleagues at home “watching” – A number of teachers in the district weren’t able to attend SLATE 2012, but said they’d be “following the conference on Twitter”. It was interesting to know that they were able to experience the conference in some way, even without attending. I was also able to dialog with them about it upon my return. 

A FINAL CONNECTION

I came away feeling particularly appreciative of the skills I learned in the Amplified Administrator class and especially connected to “live tweeting” by my experience during a presentation by Julie Mathiesen. She was listing and describing “Load-Bearing Walls of Education”. I found these interesting and was copying them into my notes. Periodically, I’d check back in Twitter to see what was being said about this presentation. One of the tweets asked, “Did anyone get Julie’s Load-Bearing Walls list?” I had just typed them into a word document, but knew it was more than the 140 character limit on Twitter. In class, we had learned how to “blog” and had created our own “blogpages”. I quickly created a blog of Julie Mathiesen’s – Load-Bearing Walls of Education and tweeted my blogpage out to #SLATE2012. Sure enough, within minutes of asking, this conference participant who had requested this information had it at her fingertips and responded with a generous thank you tweet. I felt content in knowing that I was beginning to understand and experience richer learning opportunities through Professional Learning Networks and the use of technology.