Week 4: Twitter and Theorists

September 17th, 2009

Instructional Design, Theorists, Theories, Models and Twitter.

This week I worked on figuring out Twitter and researching information about theorist John Keller.  I found out that he dropped out of college after the first year because he didn’t really know what he wanted to do.  He joined the service and became interested in philosophy. He returned to school and eventually received a PHD. From what  I have read so far I think he is a motivational type speaker, but I need to read more to be sure.  

As far as using Twitter, I never had much interest.  I didn’t understand how you could find the time to read so many unimportant messages.  I don’t care when someone is going to bed, going to work, or whatever.  As soon as I signed up I had 4 followers and all were ridiculous.  Tweets about finding men, how hot they were, etc. etc.  It seemed like this was a huge problem when I first started using the internet.  We would get porn pop ups and unsolicited e-mails, but then it got better and it doesn’t really seem like a problem now, so maybe I will figure out how to eliminate this problem with Twitter too. By the way I did block the 4 unwanted followers. 

I think Twitter could be useful to share information with  collegues important things that were being said in a meeting, to make an important announcement etc., but isn’t that what texting and emailing are about, and with 3 or 4 email accounts to follow, checking my facebook every now and then, my google reader, my new blog,  and now twitter.  An hour goes by just checking all of these things, not to mention opening my snail mail.   I guess, I don’t quite understand the importance yet.  I will keep an open mind, since there are many things I think are important today that I didn’t think were important in the past.

One thought on “Week 4: Twitter and Theorists

  1. hermant
    10:08 am - 10-4-2009

    Interestingly enough, I set IDResearch up to be a “private” group that only our class could interact within. I had barely set the account up and I also had a number of followers that I had to remove/block!

    And, like you, the mundane posts of what individuals (including celebrities and politicians) are doing from minute to minute are uninteresting to me. I was intrigued though by how the this pervasive type of technology might be used for learning, for sharing information that did matter. Like many of the technologies we might use in an educational environment, there are pros and cons to be considered. 🙂 Overall, I was highly impressed by the quality of the tweets on each theorist. You all shared a great deal of information in very few characters!

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