No Longer a Twitter Virgin

I’ll be honest, I was very skeptical going into this whole twitter for class thing. My skepticism stems mainly from my anti-twitter attitude because I believe that the world does not need to know every little thing I am doing and I don’t need to know every little thing the rest of the world is doing. Having said this I did not mind using twitter in the way that we did. It was a good way to facilitate discussion when we were not all in the same physical location. It was helpful, however, to be in the same room with two other people. Having never used twitter before, I don’t think I would have been able to figure it out quickly enough if Laura and John had not been in the same room as me. Also, we carried on our own conversation during the twitter experience that was very amusing and made the whole experience that much more enjoyable.

It definitely took a little bit of time to get settled and comfortable using the fast pace of twitter. It was also somewhat difficult to keep track of the different conversations that were going on at the same time. I got confused when people responded to other people using their user name and found myself scrolling back to see what they were responding to quite frequently. This took time which caused me to fall behind in the current line of tweets and just made things a little bit challenging. Another thing I didn’t like was the fact that we couldn’t see each other. This made interpreting people’s comments more difficult because, like Jake mentioned, I could not always tell when people were being sarcastic. Also, I felt bad when I went for long stretches without typing anything. At least in class when I don’t say anything for a long time people around me can tell that I am engaged in the conversation and paying attention from the way I look.
 

Overall, it was a good experience. I definitely would not want to have class like that every day, but it was manageable. It also may have been more constructive if we had a little more direction to the conversation. This could be in the form of a list of questions to talk about that we receive beforehand or some other way that tries to keep things a little more focused.