PressEd 2018 Conference on Twitter

I participated in a “conference” that took place entirely on Twitter March 29, 2018–PressEd 2018, about using WordPress in Education. It was a very interesting format: all presentations were series of 10-15 tweets over the course of 15 minutes, leaving time for questions at the end.

All of the tweets were on the #pressedconf18 hashtag, so you can see them by searching that tag.

Or you can see each of the presentations as Twitter moments.

I did a presentation about connecting student blogs together through syndication, in the Arts One program I taught in for many years. You can see the Tweets from this below.

I really liked this conference, for a few reasons.

  • It didn’t feel like something I had to travel to in order to get a full experience, which meant it didn’t feel like some people got a different and better experience than others.
  • It was something I could dip into and out of during the day and didn’t feel bad about it because I knew it would all be available later.
  • The sessions were in small enough chunks to digest without feeling overwhelmed. One could get bite-sized thoughts and ideas that could percolate later. And there are lots of links to go explore for the things one is particularly interested in.
  • I was able to keep exactly on time because I created the tweets beforehand and then I scheduled them to be once a minute during my 15 minutes. I didn’t go over time or feel like I wished I had just five more minutes, for maybe once in my life.
  • The small character count kept me from being too wordy or trying to cover too much (which are issues I usually have). I have to say, though, this would have been much more challenging for me back in the 140-character limit days.

I didn’t get many questions or comments afterwards, but that was okay … I felt like others were dipping in and out just like I was, and plus–the sessions were really close to each other in timing and there wouldn’t have been time to have long conversations on the hashtag without busting into someone else’s series of tweets!

Here are the tweets I sent…  And looking back, I realize I really should have had more pictures or screen grabs or something. These are all just text and links, and many others had nice visuals. I hadn’t been thinking this way, but it makes sense to consider these tweets kind of like slides for a presentation, and I wouldn’t have slides that are *only* text. So I embedded some images here in my post, even though I didn’t do it in the original tweets.

Oh well…next time! I hope this format is used again by someone/some group (something for me to consider myself!).

 

Structure of Arts One

Screen shot of part of front page of Arts One Open site

 

Ooops–the link in the above tweet is wrong. It should be: http://artsone-open.arts.ubc.ca

Tag cloud of tags on Arts One Open (you can find student & prof blog posts, plus lecture recordings, plus podcasts through these tags)

Poster for Karasik’s guest lecture March 27, 2017.

 

6 comments

  1. Great post – I too loved the conference. I did enjoy your tweets – but read them after the fact. I really liked this format. It would be fun to have students to do this with disciplines.

    1. Thanks, Lucas! I read yours after the fact as well. Great presentation on PressBooks!

      Nice idea on having student blogs from different disciplines collected on a single site. I hadn’t thought about that before. If one had an interdsciplinary course then there could be posts focused on each discipline but also they come together on a single site. Is that what you mean? Or (this would be harder), if there were a couple of courses that were about a similar topic, and students were blogging in each, one could get an interesting comparison going. Students in each course could see work from their own course but also work from the other course. It would be harder because they would be doing different things in the courses so comparing might be hard, but if one or more of the overall course topics were similar enough it might work? Just brainstorming on the fly here…

      1. Ohh that is a great idea! I was actually suggesting about having a similar twitter conference for students that are discipline specific but also love the idea of blogging this way. I thought a twitter conference that engaged students would be a neat way for them to think about the twitter networks and experts in their area.

        1. Yes, good point about twitter conference for students. Of course, the issue here in BC is that we can’t require students to be on a social media platform where their data goes to the U.S. And sometimes I worry about even encouraging it just because I honestly don’t know what Twitter does with our data (considering the concerns raised recently with Facebook). Sure, all our posts are public on Twitter (except DMs) so there’s a sense in which one has already given up privacy, but does Twitter scrape our data and do anything with it like sell it to others? I don’t know…I’ll have to look into that!

  2. I also thought the format for presenting was great, easy to read and then links to follow up on. It might have been better to have the one tab for presenting and a side chat tag. their would have enabled space for async questions. I knew that presenters were all scheduling their tweets but also assumed they would be online at the time of their presentation, no room for questions.

    1. Oh, interesting idea–a side chat tag. I do think that probably many or all of us were also online, live, during our presentations; we were encouraged to be available to answer questions, so I expect we were there online during our times. The only thing that might have made it difficult is remembering which tag is which, and remembering to put the questions in the chat tag! I suppose another option would have been to have more of a break between the sessions, for questions.

Comments are closed.