Twitter is a website where you have 140 characters to type what you want to say to the other users of Twitter. This amount of characters was chosen so to make the site similar to text messaging, because that was how many characters that the first cell phones’ text messages could send. Twitter encourages micro-blogging. This is where you can tell people about your day, ideas, or just about links that you find interesting in 140 characters. Now you may think that Twitter is a social network, so it would attract a lot of people who want to use it for personal use, but it also has a large professional crowd.
I don’t like writing in Twitter. I must include too many details in my posts because I always go over the 140 character limit. And using bad grammar and spelling just makes my skin cringe.
However it has connected me with several opportunities to further my education about the Educational Field, because I had started following teachers on Twitter. They seem to post very interesting articles about the classroom and free material for lesson plans. Everyone on Twitter has a main page that they can write anything they want about themselves. This is great because you can add your photo and a description about yourself or your own website, if you have one.
Twitter is also another site that gives you minimal privacy. You can set your account to private, but then none of your tweets can be seen by anyone other than the people you follow. This defeats the purpose of posting something online. When you post online you are sharing your post with the rest of the people on that website and the rest of the people that the first group of people share your post with and so on.
One thing that can get diminished when you use Twitter is your spelling and grammar skills. In order to meet that 140 character limit people abbreviate their messages as much as possible. One cool feature that twitter has in the hastag. The hashtag can be put in your message and when people search the hash tag your post will come up. Many professionals use a hashtag to have live conversations or chats on Twitter. I have searched the hashtag #edchat and this is what came up.
This hashtag got 11 more tweets just as I was typing this so it is used daily.
So the composing environment does impact what people write on Twitter. You have a limited amount of space to write, so people will abbreviate, and if you want to post a picture you have to have the picture posted somewhere else first and then put the link onto Twitter. Like I have said before, once you post something on the internet it is now seen by everyone, so be careful what you write. Some people may love what you have written, while others will hate it. I am starting to like Twitter for more professional and informational reasons. The articles being posted around are fun and interesting to read.
Educators Anonymous Four 