Twittering and Forgetting

The title of this post is a play on a book I read The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith in 1998 when I was working with arts educators on integrating technology into their lesson plans.   I would recommend technology resources and they would share books about learning.   Smith's book explains the history of learning theories and practice.  He establishes two ways of thinking about educational practice--the official view of learning and the classical view.

The official view of learning is the belief that it only occurs when a person is taught.  A lot of educational practices seem based on the notion that there would be no knowledge if people didn't come to an expert or the teacher seeking it.   The classical view suggests that people learn all of the time through meaningful experiences and through immersion in a community of practice.

I'm not sure what Smith's book has to do with twittering and tagging, but there is a connection. 

Twitter is the here and now, archiving the past is not built into the design.   Yet, if you can't archive and retrieve information that you want to reflect on and share with a community, it's forgotten.   Or, you remember but can't retrieve which makes it difficult to share.   Tagging helps memory and helps keep found resources found.  Twitter helps you connect with people or a community and somehow ignites sharing.  How can the two impulses be combined?

I have an inelegant solution.  It's double work -- if I read a friend's tweet or if I ask a question and get a response, I bookmark the tweet url into del.icio.us and tag it.  Many times I forget.   

Chel Pixel has another method that shared in the comments.   She uses the favorites option. "If there's something I recall that I want to go back to, I can usually remember the tweet enough to google it and come up with what I'm looking for. Of course, you'd have to remember enough of the tweet and the user and the context to get it to come up but it works wonders for me since I don't often forget something." 

Corey P of the 501c3Cast uses a rss feed for "nonprofit" search with Terraminds. He mentions, "I love that it finds both "nonprofit" and "non-profit" Adding "tech" to the search narrows down the results and when people use both words, the post is still recognizable by people who aren't familiar with the nptech tag."

Those examples are about the individual's use -- keeping found things found.  But what about a community of practice approach? 

That's where I initial thought the idea #nptech on twitter might be something to explore.  The main objection is taking up real estate in the limited 140 character tweet.   

Sue Waters send me a tweet about an alternative to hastags.  Then she wrote an entire post on an alternative to hashtags - Tweetscan:

My thoughts, after spending considerable time previously investigating how to get more out of using twitter, would be to use TweetScan rather than hashtags.   TweetScan locates all tweets, by any twitter user, that include the term you use (thanks Alan Levine for telling me about TweetScan).  With TweetScan you can choose to:

1. Subscribe to the RSS feed for the tracking term using your feed reader
2. or  join TweetScan and have the search results email to your daily or weekly.  Via email can use up to 5 search terms.

I use TweetScan for tracking people’s replies to my twitter name dswaters and any other variations people have used e.g. suewaters.  However TweetScan is just as useful for tags like nptech.

She goes on to describe how this might work with a group:

You would need to ask all twitters to use the required tag term within their tweet and teach them how to effectively subscribe to the RSS feed.

I wonder if this would be too much habit formation and that wouldn't stick?  I wonder if it just wouldn't be better to have tagging in the interface or some sort of automated way to tag your tweets into a social bookmarking service?  As Alan Levine notes in the comments, "This all may help increase the voices calling to the twitter-masters to consider including a true tagging feature."

Comments

[Sue Waters]

Hi Beth - Thanks for telling people about the solution I offered with TweetScan. But as you point out nothing seems to be a quick fix to this issue.

Another thought is to tackle it another way - set up a twitter account called Nptech. Get all NPtech people to follow this account but NPtech account doesn't follow people back. Use the NPtech account to only send important links and get all followers to send information to it using @NPtech this way only the most important information will be shared. The only problem will be that everyone will need to subscribe to feed from the twitter account.

[Beth Kanter]

Sue,

I like that idea! People could subscribe to the feed or I would use that another source to write up the summaries. Thanks for your ideas .. still would have to get people to use the @nptech

[ThomasT]

This interesting tweet from Snitter, my preferred Twitter client, may provide some relief:

Twitter API allows up to 160 char tweet. Still clipped at 140 but can view full tweet on Twitter site. Click tweet date in Snitter to view.

If these search apps are pulling the full 160 chars (and why wouldn't they be, and people are using the web interface or clients that allow the super-double-secret extended char limit, then adding the hash tag or other item at the end means that people can still see the full text of your message in the 140 chars, but the tag can be in the extended 20 chars and not cramp your twoosh style.

[oso]

I assume that the Book of Learning and Forgetting is a play on the Book of Laughter and Forgetting?