I’ve been preparing for another Twitter workshop this morning and spent part of the time looking for examples of people who Twitter. As Twitter is all about your network, if you don’t build one then you are unlikely to see the benefits and stick with it. My last Twitter workshop was at the Plymouth E-Learning conference (pictured) and ‘selling’ Twitter to elearning folk is fairly straight-forward as there are lots of educational technology types to follow (BTW – There are over 1000 Twitter updates related to the Plymouth conference!).
My workshop on Wednesday is for staff at the LSE who are not educational technologists so I wanted to have a list of ‘people’ to follow that might be more relevant to them. Finding people is quite difficult when you are looking beyond your own network so below are a few starting point I’ll be highlighting on Wednesday. If you’ve any more social science related twitterers, let me know!
For politics there’s a lot of potential, Tweetminster is a good site bringing together the feeds of MPs who Twitter, as well as @DowningStreet, @UKParliament and @guidofawkes to keep you in touch with goings-on in Westminster. According to sourcewatch there are 19 Senators and 50 Representatives in the US Congress twittering away. Other examples i’ll be highlighting are @intuteeconomics,@IntutePsychUK, @policynetwork, @HEFCE, @GuardianEdu, as well as a handful at LSE @lsepublicevents, @lsecareers, @lsesummerschool & @charliebeckett
And I’ll be encouraging the use of searching via both Find People & Twitter Advanced Search. I’ll also highlight sites such as wefollow.com which have lists such as academics who Twitter. Once you have a small network it gets easier and I found browsing friends of my followers the best way to widen my network.
Slides from my Plymouth workshop:
My annotated Twitter handouts are also on slideshare.
Thanks for that Matt. I am doing session soon and you’ll give some good ideas.
Some great tips Matt. I’m running a similar type of session in June, aimed at PG researchers and with a networking for careers slant.
I also wanted some folks for people follow in this area. I’ve started by mining a few twitter accounts such as @GuardianJobs & @Jobsacuk to see who they follow. Its been a pretty useful exercise although I’m sure there is a tool out there that would make life easier ???