Stairs leading from one street to another in Quebec City. Taken in August 2008 on my way to the IFLA Conference Center.

After two fantastic weeks of vacation, I am back at work and gradually catching up with correspondence. As anyone who has returned to the office after avoiding two weeks’ worth of messages can probably attest, it’s a formidable hill to climb. There are over 300 posts on pedagogy and technology waiting for me in my Google Reader. Before I leap into reading them, however, I thought I’d turn over a new leaf and set up a new way to share noteworthy items on this blog. That new method is via a Twitter feed.

The plan:

Set up a special Twitter account just for WISE Pedagogy and add a “tweet box” widget to this blog. Then, as I sort through updates and news for elearning, I tweet the links (while simultaneously tagging them to my Delicious account). The tweeted links are then shared on the blog so that anyone not on Twitter who follows the blog can see what has recently been tweeted. Meanwhile, anyone who is on Twitter is welcome to follow the feed directly.

The execution:

The account on Twitter has been created. You can find it here: http://twitter.com/wisepedagogy

The tweet box has been added (widgeted?) as well. Whether it turns out to be useful, however, is yet to be determined.

So far I’m surprised that the tweets are appearing in such a miniscule font. I’ve seen these on other websites and they have appeared in a legible size, so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Basically I just copied and pasted the html code from the Twitter widget website…can any avid Twitter users offer advice for adjusting this so it’s legible?

In the meantime, this exercise is also an attempt to overcome my own hesitancy to delve into the morass of the twitterverse so I can report back to those instructors who are likewise hesitant to use it. Should more instructors use Twitter for regular (and frequent) communication? The e-learning specialists who avidly use twitter would probably answer with an emphatic YES. Many online faculty I’ve spoken with, on the other hand, would give an emphatic NO.

So, this begins an experiment in using Twitter to communicate useful information. Will it actually make its way to the people who would find it useful? We’ll see!

Do you have an opinion one way or the other about using Twitter in online learning? Leave a comment below. Why (or how) do you use Twitter? If not, why do you avoid it?