Collaborative Communities, Personal Learning Communities, and Twitter

The instructors for the UW-Stout E-Learning course Collaborative Communities (register now for Summer 2011 Session: June 20 - August 12, 2011)
, Kay Lehmann and Lisa Chamberlin have been experimenting with uses of social media to support their eLearning certificate program course. Kay and Lisa are the authors of Making the Move to eLearning: Putting Your Course Online. They use Twitter daily. 

According to Kay, "Twitter provides us with links to good resources and articles as well as letting us network with some of the finest minds in the fields of education and online learning. We want our students to join us on Twitter. We advise them they can be lurkers, meaning they don't have to post messages, known as tweeting. We think everyone needs a Professional Learning Network (PLN) and your PLN is incomplete if you are not using Twitter."

How do you join Kay and Lisa on Twitter? Go to http://twitter.com and click "Sign up now" button. Complete the form and create your Twitter account. Fill in your profile page. Go to settings and complete the "Account tab", "Notices" tab, and "Picture" tab (you can use an avatar of your choosing but most Twitter users do have some sort of visual identifier). These are the most vital.

Use the Find People button and search for chamberln_Instr and kay_lehmann and start following both of them. Lisa also posts as chambo_online

Messages for the students in the Collaborative Communities course will include #ccstout in the tweet. This phrase preceded by a # is known as a hashtag, it is a way to mark tweets and make them searchable. There are other hashtags which may be of interest to people in the eLearning certificate program including #eLearning or #mLearning.



Kay Lehmann, EdD
lehmannk@uwstout.edu
C 509-520-1046 (Pacific time zone)
Online Professional Development
College of Education, Health and Human Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Stout
http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/
Co-Author of Making the Move to eLearning: Putting Your Course Online