Learning from Twitter

Last week I attended the National Conference on Education.  There were some great sessions and speakers.  We heard from Jim Collins, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Yong Zhao.  I heard all three speakers, but it is impossible to attend all the sessions.  Thankfully most conferences now post session presentations in some manner. 

But during the first presentation I learned something.  I was trying to take notes as well as Tweeting out various thoughts on the conference hashtag #nce13.  About halfway through that first session I decided that I really didn't need to take notes.  Instead I could follow the hashtag and essentially get notes from lots of people.

There weren't folks Tweeting in every session.  In fact I expected more Tweeting than what there was.  At any rate, I was able to learn quite a bit out of other sessions.  And my personal learning network grew.

I recently joked that Facebook is for gossip and Twitter is for learning.  My experience last week reinforced that Twitter can certainly be used for learning.