Week 12 Class: Following people, professionally

After what felt like a cacophonous struggle to sort out my custom Twitter list last week, I was grateful to discover that I was not completely alone in my sentiments when we discussed the exercise in class this week. Prof. Fontichiaro revealed that the exercise had first been assigned four years ago; fewer students had had previous experience with the service, and the service itself - the features, the networks, and the content of tweets in general - looked different in important ways. Many students in this class had accounts before the exercise, but the content of the new lists we created wasn't as simple and clear as the lists of four years ago might have been.

As I noticed before, there's the issue of the single stream of tweets from an account; not all topics from a fellow in the profession will be professional, as one might prefer as a follower. Some students mentioned that they had, for this reason, created a second account for their professional tweets. Perhaps I shall do the same if I ever enter a point of more frequent tweeting in the future.

Another thing that became apparent was the significance of Twitter's API; Twitter's native web interface is quite limited, something that several developers for both web and mobile have made apparent through the capabilities of their own products. I noticed that lists do not show retweets, but this is only true of the native web interface; Chris, with whom I reflected about the exercise, was not aware of the issue at all because such a shortcoming was not the case for her through her mobile app. Prof. Fontichiaro also showed how her web service of choice allows her to wrangle multiple accounts, subjects, and lists at a time, something impossible through the native site.

The discussion moved on to PLNs: Personal Learning Networks. These are the professionals and peers you follow or otherwise connect with in order to keep abreast of current issues and developments in your chosen career path. Ideally, you might be able to gain advice or feedback from a few of them on your own projects and ideas. This concept falls in line with the networking mindset, something I still need to work on; I tend to pay more attention to concepts and ideas, and it takes me longer to remember the names that might be prominent in relation to them. During the Twitter exercise, though, I did stumble across Dan Cohen, the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, and I recognized his name and institution when it launched officially on Thursday. Methinks I need to work on building and cultivating a PLN on my own time without the requirements and deadlines of a class assignment in order to get the best benefit.