I’ve got 389 tweets with the #lilly09 hashtag from last week’s Lilly Conference on College Teaching. I estimate that a little over 300 of those are mine. The rest are responses, queries, retweets, encouragement. No doubt a few are unaccounted for because in the heat of the moment I forgot to append the hashtag. Nevertheless, nearly 400 tweets from a three-day conference is still a pretty healthy number, especially since so far as I know I was the only one using that hashtag. (Nothing in the conference materials said anything about a conference hashtag, unless I missed it.)
I’m still not entirely sure what drove me to tweet the conference so extensively. Part of it was a habit I’ve gotten into from other conferences. Part of it was that there were very few tweeters at this conference, so I felt a little more duty-bound to get some stuff into the stream. Most of it was that the sessions were typically thought-provoking and valuable. (I lapsed into silence now and then, rather than post snark.) I’ve gotten way behind on my conference blogging, so I thought that micro-blogging with Twitter would be better than trying to blog about the conference weeks later, the situation I’m usually in these days.
There’s a lot more to say about the conference, of course, but for now, a Wordle created by Joe Fahs of Elmira College out of the many posts in that Twitter stream. As I’ve come to expect from Wordle, the distribution (and Joe’s artful manipulation of the visualization) tells its own tale of the experience. A tale that resonates with the truth of what I found there. My thanks to Joe, and to my wonderful PLN on Twitter who keep me thinking more about possibilities than about liabilities.
Hi Gardner,
The Lilly attendees are not Twitterers… I did pretty much the same thing you did at Lilly09 at Lilly-East09 last April. I did it for myself, using Twitter to take minutes of what happened. But then, I realized some time later that the Twitter search doesn’t go back in time as long as it used to…
Therefore, I don’t use Twitter for this purpose anymore, preferring something more permanent like CoverItLive. It doesn’t have the same live impact, but it’s a better use of live texting in my opinion. And you can always go back to your archives to tweet your highlights afterward.
@Mathieu,
Hi! and thanks for checking in with a comment. I agree that Twitter’s not good as a note-taking archive past a week or so. That said, I love the in-the-moment connections with my personal learning network. Twitter’s where they are. So what I’ve done is to grab the Twitterstream each day, or after the conference is over, and archive that. For me, tweeting highlights after the fact would not be twitter-esque–that is, it wouldn’t give me the same experience. Plus, I know myself well enough to know that I’d probably never go back to tweet something out of the moment.
So that’s the solution I’ve settled on.
I do find that following certain people in a list seems to make the archive go back much farther, but that of course is also subject to change (and Twitter’s not really an archive anyway, I think).
I agree that Twitter is where it’s at. If there was an easy way to retrieve or archive tweets around a conference or a hashtag, it would be great. On second thought, there is probably one, we just didn’t find it yet đŸ˜‰