Category: twitter

Friday Five: A half-decade on Twitter

Tomorrow marks my five-year anniversary as a tweeter. It is, as the Twitter-anniversary-tracking tool @TwBirthday reminded me this morning, the eve of my TwBirthday.

I suppose I should get all retrospective, talk about how few of us there were back then, how it was a nice, close-knit community, blah blah blah. But frankly, I wasn’t even thinking about the personal historic significance of this day from the perspective of my social media use. I rolled out of bed with thoughts of GSD on my mind this Friday. Hell, I didn’t even have a Friday Five in mind.

But then the twitterverse and Domagoj Pavlesic, who developed the TwBirthday tool, handed me this gift. So, on the eve of my five-year anniversary on Twitter, I offer you my five favorite posts on this blog about Twitter.

  1. Twitter: My go-to learning network. This post really captures why I enjoy Twitter so much, and why it’s my social network of choice, far and above all others. And this post isn’t even original. I borrow heavily from the ideas articulated in a post by Nigel Cameron, who puts it much better than I can.
  2. Best Twitter guide ever — another recycled (read: stolen) post, one that lent itself nicely to a Friday Five.
  3. TwitterVerse (for World Poetry Day) — in which I offer this bit of doggerel: Social media’d be less sweet/Were it not for @jack‘s first tweet
  4. Fun with Twitter StreamGraphs. Remember StreamGraphs? I haven’t played with StreamGraphs since, well, probably since soon after posting this entry.
  5. Your tweet was over 140 characters. You’ll have to be more clever. This is the blog post I wish I’d written, by the pretty damned clever Todd Sanders (@tsand).

On August 15, don’t forget ed

This Wednesday, Aug. 15, the College Board‘s campaign to draw attention to higher education, Don’t Forget Ed, kicks into high gear.

The timing is not coincidental. The start of the fall semester just around the corner, and so are the national conventions of the two major political parties. And the goal of the “Don’t Forget Ed” campaign is to get both presidential candidates to pay attention to education.

Getting politicians to pay attention to education may sound simple, but it’s actually a pretty ambitious goal, given everything else on the national agenda. So that’s why the Don’t Forget Ed campaign needs our help.

What can you do? For starters, watch the video (also embedded below). Then go to the website to learn more about how you can help. Then, add your voice to the cause. Finally, on Aug. 15, join in on the Don’t Forget Ed social media rally on Twitter and Facebook. Follow @DontForgetEd on Twitter and use the #dontforgeted hashtag to spread the word about this effort. Let’s show our presidential candidates — and the world — just how the #highered community can rally. If we did it to help some of our own win a cross-country tweetrace, then surely we can band together for the future of education in our nation, right?