What’s New About Education – Twitter??

A recent article on the blog site mashable.com, Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education points to yet another way people are using Social Media. Lon Cohen points out that people are learning about meaty topics from Twitter surreptitiously,

“Many of them [Twitter users] don’t even know it and that’s the beauty. There is no course outline, no costly tuition (yet anyway), no declared major, and you can take as many electives as you want. There’s also no hard and fast list of required experience to be my personal Twitter Professor and tenure is non-existent. I do have very simple guidelines I keep in my head when designating my Twitter Professors:

1. RT really smart stuff from the people they follow saving me from sifting through even more of a stream of Tweets.
2. Have insightful Tweets in and of themselves (not just links).
3. Inspire me to engage in conversation with them or with others.
4. Write really great articles/blog posts on subjects I want to learn about or point to interesting articles I would never have read otherwise.
5. Expand my world experience through their stream of Tweets.”

Twitter Professor and fellow Radical Inclusion founder, Holger Nauheimer, creator of the Change Management Toolbook, recently created a Twitter seminar called, 10 Tweets, The Change Journey. This offering really gets to the heart of social media culture and its spirit of open collaboration and sharing.

The seminar was promoted beforehand and then at a specific time interested participants converged on Twitter to read and tweet about ten topics related to the Change Journey. Each tweet included a link to another expert on change in the form of a website, blog and even YouTube videos. A couple of example tweets from the seminar:

Change is a mental construct. Organizations need new thinking, co-created in a dialogue

All people have purposes, concerns, circumstances. Being appreciated, they will collaborate

The seminar lasted for about 60 minutes. Not only did I get some new resources on change management thinking, I made some new contacts and widened my own Twitter following. Holger is now planning another seminar.

Read a summary of the entire 10-Tweets seminar at Holger’s Blog