Thanks for coming to read this. I need your help please, if you can spare a few minutes of your precious time.
As might have seen from twitter, #eltchat is going to have a symposium at IATEFL about social networking. My talk is going to centre on hashtagging.
I’ve decided it would also be a good talk to do at a conference in early January. The downside of that decision is that I now need to plan and write the talk. I thought I’d try and use social networking to provide the content for the talk and that’s where you come in.
I’d like to talk about both the positive and negative things of hashtagging – I think it is important to look at the downsides as we can learn from this as much as the positives.
For me the use of hashtags has made it easier to find everything from activities to apps to conferences. What about you?
What I’d like is short audio and video clips along with some comments from as many of you as possible on the topic ‘What has / hasn’t hashtagging done for you’?
Please send me your contributions via twitter, email (shaunwilden@gmail.com) or via this post.
Thanks
Shaun
As a further point of reference, this is my absract for IATEFL along with the proposed running order of the talk
Abstract
23.08. 07, the day the first # was used on twitter. Since then they’ve come a long way especially for teachers. From an online staffroom to a never-ending resource list, the # is an important part of the ELT. This talk addresses the benefits of hashtagging and answers the doubters by asking what has #hashtagging ever done for us?
Proposed running order
The talk begins with reference to the python sketch discussing ‘What the Roman’s have done” during their occupation of Judea. It uses this to make the analogy to the use of the hashtag on twitter.
In the ‘Roman’s sketch’ people list things that the Roman’s have done while under the impression they have done nothing much. Using this idea, the talk will ask the audience in the room and online to consider what hashtagging has done for them.
It will move on to explore a number of the negative comments people have put forward about hashtags and the use of twitter as a means of teacher education and development. These criticisms include factors such as 140 characters is not a good forum for critical discussion, it’s just a bunch of mates, people simply retweet, there’s too much to read, there’s no control of who says what and so on.
Each comment will be addressed with reference to positive aspects of hashtagging drawing on the work of #eltchat and making reference to other groups such as #breltchat #eltpics, #iatefl etc.
Finally by using ‘talking heads’ video recordings of teachers around the world and the live #eltchat twitter stream, the talk will conclude by looking at how #hashtagging has benefitted teachers in a number of different teaching contexts.
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Twitter hashtagging has been 95% responsible for the bringing together of the over 5,500 photographs in the eltpics flickr photo resource for teachers http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/ , as well as
- for the creation of the eltchat community,
- the organisation of several tweet-ups eg TESOL France,
- following conferences you can’t attend and would never have dreamed of being part of not too many years ago (tho some presenters doubt the usefulness of this facet),
- and I suspect the winners of a couple of XFactor contests (which I’ve never seen, but the tweets abound at weekends…).
It is also useful for something as simple but as important as saying thank you to people eg after conferences.
As a newbie to twitter I can see and understand the benefit of hashtags (I am sure I had some of them with bacon and a fried egg for breakfast once in Boston), however, it is taking me a while to get used to reading tweets and working out how to filter information. This is especially true when I have been away, even only for a couple of hours, and I have a large number of tweets to wade through. It also made me feel a little disorientated and not part of the group when I started out as I was not entirely sure when or where to use them.
What I find fantastic about #s is that you can follow any conversation even after it has finished. I very rarely manage to take part in live #ELTchats, but I always makes sure to browse through the tweets as well as the brilliant summaries. It’s great to see how people interact with each other. One thing I have yet to learn is to be able to follow a live hashtag conversation. When there are 20-25 or even more people taking place in a conversation, I get very confused and by the time I manage to put my contribution to the conversation into 132 characters, it usually becomes irrelevant or someone has already mentioned it. I am still working on this skill. Meeting new people is definitely another advantage. The way people take part in a conversation is the best indicator of whether they would be interesting to follow. I never leave an #edchat or #eltchat without making at least a couple of new contacts (dare I say friends).
Check out how Guardian reported analysis of SM wrt riots 48hrs ago. Bucket load of good science. Haven’t got link on my phone.
I will throw in a few things hashtagging hasn’t done for me. It hasn’t really organized information since anyone can hashtag anything in anyway they like. On the other hand, some group mechanism does lead to popularizing of certain hashtahs. And it hasn’t always been the best way to search since not everyone chooses to hashtag things. Or hashtags them at random. I never know whether to look at #esl, #elt, #e2l, #tesol, or #tesl. It seems like everyone has personal preferences. Personally rather than hashtags, I would prefer a fairly clever search engine like google that can search tweets with some intuition for keywords and synonyms and related words.
Now a deliberate hashtag community like #ELTchat solves a lot of those problems. As does an established company or organization saying, “Use this hastag to do this” But those are rather limited cases. Furthermore, when #ELTchat is underway and people are conversing, I do wish there was a way to take those tweets out of the mainstream. My non-teacher friends don’t appreciate reading so many pieces of a conversation that they aren’t a part of. In general, I think twitter is a lousy conversation device and have never fully grasped why people who want to chat don’t use chat programs.