Results from Twitter goals survey

I am preparing an introductory Twitter presentation and am using information from a blog post by Charlene Kingston dealing with setting goals for your own use of Twitter.

I asked my Twitter PLN to answer a short survey on this topic. I sent the tweet out to my 4625 followers, and some of my followers re-tweeted the request to 4019 of their followers (who may or may not overlap with my followers.) I received 196 responses, many in the first few hours of posting the request on Twitter.

The yes/no questions were as follows:

1. I am a K-16 educator or pre-service educator.
2. I use Twitter to talk to friends and family
3. I use Twitter to find business customers.
4. I use Twitter to form a professional network
5. I use Twitter to send out and share information.
6. I use Twitter to receive information.
7. I have more than one Twitter account so I can keep my personal and professional tweets separate.

Results:

7% of the respondents were not K-16 educators

93% of the respondents were K-16 educators

8% of the non-K16 educators had separate Twitter accounts for personal and professional use.

24% of the K16 educators had separate Twitter accounts for personal and professional use

The goals for the use of Twitter by the non-K16 educators are illustrated in the graph below.

The goals for the use of Twitter by the K-16 educators are illustrated in the graph below.

The graphs were created using the NCES Create-A- Graph site.

A big thank-you to all who responded!

Twitter is not for email

During the past month or so, I have realized people are beginning to use Twitter as their main form of communication. I am a regular Twitter user and follower, but do not keep it open on my desktop all day. I use it how it is intended to be used-- to post quick items of interest or respond with a short message to someone seeking help on a topic. And I think carefully before I answer, to determine whether the response is only useful for the questioner (and DM the answer) or if others might also benefit from the answer (and reply with the @questioner). I try not to clutter up the list with responses that are meaningless to most others. That is part of the Twetiquette (Twitter etiquette).

(Addendum: I was not implying above that people should not post "meaningless" (read "fun") items to Twitter. What I was referring to is the practice of replying to a post via an @username on the list when the actual answer only makes sense to the person who asked the question. It often does not make sense when one sees only an answer.)

I am starting to receive some of the reference questions I receive regularly from educators via Twitter. The direct messages from Twitter show up in my email inbox, and I then have to go open my Twitter client, locate the DM, and respond to the questioner.

It is easy to ask a question in 140 characters, but not so easy to answer with anything meaningful in that number of characters. So, I wind up DM'ing three or four separate messages to the questioner, including having to shorten a URL or two in the Twitter messages.

Twitter is not the place for that kind of communication, in my opinion. If you have a question that you want answered which you know will require me to search the Web and do some research, please don't send it via Twitter.

I am easy enough to find on the Web, and, if you don't have it, here is my email address: kathy@kathyschrock.net

I am always glad to help, but not always in 140-character bursts!

Searching the Twitterverse

Since I very rarely visit the official browser-based Twitter site, finding it better for my workflow to run a computer-based client called twhirl, I had forgotten about the search tools available on the official Twitter site.

One of my concerns about Twitter is the amount of information that seems to be non-permanent. My Twitter feed is constantly flowing with all types of great information from my ed-tech PLN, and there are times that I want to get back to something from a month ago. (In addition, I also would like to see what the rest of the world is tweeting about, too!)

Twitter has a robust advanced search page which I recommend you try out.

As you can see from the screenshot below, it is easy to limit or broaden your search by filling in multiple pieces of information.

Screenshot courtesy of twitter.com, 2/14/09

In addition to the advanced search page, Twitter also offers a handy list of operators you can use right from the simple search box to conduct a search.

Once you conduct a search, you can easily choose to add the RSS feed for that search to your newsreader (Bloglines, Netvibes, Google Reader, etc.) to follow that person, topic, or even just be notified when a word that you are interested in is included in a tweet.

Screenshot courtesy of twitter.com, 2/14/09

Take some time to conduct complex searches using the Twitter advanced search page or conduct a search and aggregate it for "watching". At least you are guaranteed each entry is short and quick to read!

Why Twitter? Of course!

I tried Twitter a few months ago and did not "get it" and I stopped using it. I picked it back up this weekend, and today I had that "a-ha" moment and realized why I will continue to use it.

I discovered a neat techno-trick today. I had a 118 MB, 84 slide PowerPoint presentation that I to move into someone else's template and it was not going well. So, I simply saved the presentation as JPEGs, created a photo album in PowerPoint with the organization's template as the background and imported the JPEGs of the slides, and just resized the JPEGs on the slides so their logo showed. Imagine my surprise, after saving this new presentation, to realize that the 188 MB PowerPoint presentation was now only 5.6 MB! I don't know why, but, in case you are interested, here are the steps again.

1. Save your large presentation as JPEGs which creates a folder with each slide as its own JPEG.
   
2. Open a new presentation and choose to create a photo album in PowerPoint, choose the folder of JPEGs as your "photos" and then save that photo alubum.
   
3. Miraculously, the slide show is much smaller than the orginal!
   

So, usually when I have a techno-discovery I go charging out of my office to share the news with someone-- a teacher, secretary, or even a 6th grader if they will listen. No one is usually very interested. However, today I went right to Twitter to share my discovery with people who ARE interested!

I have figured out the power of Twitter (for me) is the ability to share my ideas and thoughts with like-minded individuals who DO get excited about geeky techno-discoveries and enjoy sharing their own, too!

w00t and thanks to my Twitter buddies!