Logging into Twitter can be overwhelming sometimes. There’s a lot going on and any given tweet could be pushed out of view before we get the chance to give it a look. For those of use who check our Twitter feeds every once in a while, it can seem like too much of a mess to bother keeping up with. Scheduled at specific times and organized by hashtags, Twitter chats turn the microblogging platform into a more straightforward chat session about a given topic. Yesterday, I spent about an hour checking out a Twitter chat about language education, #LangChat.
LangChat has multiple sessions scheduled throughout the week, which makes a lot of sense given the global nature of the topic (world language education) and platform. I joined the session that starts at 10AM EST Saturday morning. The chat is operated in a Q&A format with moderators proposing questions and participants posting answers, sparking some discussion as replies. At the end of the chat, participants are asked to share what they took away from the session.
I think this platform and discussion format works really well. Dropping in on a weekly chat like this is a great way to find and share ideas and resources. It’s also a great way to find professionals active in your field to expand your network. The questions posted by moderators help jumpstart discussion on relevant topics, and suggestions from participants are also accepted throughout the week. What I like most about doing this via Twitter, as opposed to a discussion forum or similar, is the real-time access to other users. Shooting someone a reply to ask for clarification or to elaborate on a point made is very straightforward, and the responses are more or less immediate. Of course, this also means we have to schedule a specific time to be available to join the session in the first place. Overall, this felt like a great way to utilize the immediacy and quick-moving nature of Twitter in a way that benefitted me more than just occasionally checking a disorganized feed of everyone I’m following.
I think that at lot of people feel that sometimes Twitter can seem overwhelming and that they wish there was a way for it to be more organized. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that the Twitter chats seemed to do that.
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