What’s the buzz? Tell me what’sa happenin’

Cicada

A year ago, I suppose I would’ve felt much link Mrs. Huff when she says, “For one thing, the cacophony just sounds scary to me, and for another, it sounds like a time leech.”

The cacophony is a bit scary at times.  So many ideas, links, tweets coming faster than I can refresh the page.  But it’s in that cacophony that I’ve come to find so many intriguing, inspiring, and intellecually challenging ideas that I’ve often wondered why my school district doesn’t give me inservice points (hours used for recertification in FL)  for reading twitter.

When I was trying to clean out my feeds, I came across this post by English teacher Dana Huff (who, has many phenomenal resources for teaching high school English) in which she asks the question I continually ask myself everytime I head over to twitter to see what other people are doing:  what’s the point?

For instance: this summer I had decided not to attend Alan November’s “Building Learning Communities” conference in Boston.  A friend and former co-worker was able to attend, and through her and the use of twitter and ustream, I was able to lurk and listen in on several empowering workshops. Her updates on twitter allowed me and others to find her video streams and participate.

So, here are a few questions to you:  What have you learned from your network on twitter that you might not have learned otherwise?  Have you been able to make connections with other educators you might not have made without twitter?  How has using twitter helped shape your own learning?