Week Three - Play/ Reflect

This week, for the Play component, we had to set up a twitter account and carry out several twitter-related tasks. These included:

- "following" course lecturers

- "addressing" a tweet to a lecturer requesting to join the class twitter list (shown below)

- following the QUT information studies group

- following QUT library 
- adding your twitter handle to your blog either through a widget or a link on your blog (shown below) and

- following other information/ library organisations. As library studies is my major I am following a number of LISprofs and information hubs including the Association for Information Science and Technology, the  Library of Congress and the  National Library of Australia.

For the Reflect task I chose to comment on the following statement:

What role do you think blogging and tweeting will have in your learning, both in this unit and beyond it? Can you see yourself continuing to use either a blog or Twitter after this semester?  

Blogging and tweeting originally seemed like activities that would serve more as distractions than learning tools. Admittedly, I have played around with the blog template on multiple occasions and haven’t always tweeted the most academic of posts. However, I feel that this is all part of getting to know a new tool, learning new technologies and allows you to better use the tool in a constructive way. For example, using hashtags in twitter has allowed me to link up with students in the same course and follow interesting posts related to the LIS field. Not only this, but quick assignment queries can be posted, answered and read by the cohort through using the hashtag feature – an invaluable trait of twitter. This connectivity is a perk of both blogging and tweeting; you’re able to create a name for yourself within your chosen field, network with likeminded people and get noticed by other industry professionals (hopefully, and hopefully positively). This also means, if people are paying attention to your online movements that there is some level of accountability. Posting diary-like entries on blogger is one way I have found to keep up the internal pact with myself and the imaginary one I have with readers of my blog: to work consistently and be a meaningful contributor to the LIS field.

Both tools have pros and cons and these would have to be weighed up against their value as a learning tool if I were to continue using them. So far I’ve managed not to get too wrapped up in the rapid fire delivery of information via twitter and through the course expectations, have managed not to leave my blog posts too sporadic (says me). I have found that:

-          blogging hasn’t provided the best start to networking with LISprofs (though this may be down to the content I produce)

-           it has been challenging to keep up a consistent commentary for all units through the blog and

-          I’m following a lot of people unrelated to my field of learning on twitter.

These are issues that may need reviewing if I plan to make long-term use of these tools.

My expectation is that I will continue to use twitter as a way to stay abreast of topical issues relating to the LIS field (due to the number of key commentators/ organisations using this tool) and my contributions to this area will be less centred around blog posts and have a focus on both tweets and portfolio updates. I will be interested to see if this view changes and whether I will have to set up a new way to maintain consistency.