As I prepared to write this, I became amused by the fact that my three kids were just outside making a racket because they were seeing a double rainbow. This is ironic, given that I was introduced to the video at the bottom of this post yesterday (I suggest stopping at 1:21, but your call. By the way, I keep putting videos at the bottom of posts because I am getting a big space after them; anyone know how to avoid this?). Amusing, also, was the fact that they could hear the kids across the woods behind us yelling to their parents about the "double rainbow," too. Being aware of the video, they figured those kids had also seen it. I hear a lot of things outside, not just my children. It all starts at sunrise. I don't have air conditioning. In the warm months, I wake up every day to an actually deafening chorus of birds singing in the large trees outside my open windows and over the pasture in front of my hay barn: swallows, robins, cardinals, doves, blackbirds, orchard orioles, and plenty of birds that I wish I recognized by their calls, but don't. I can't control the noise except to shut the windows; this means I have to get out of bed. Then, sometimes, I am awake enough that I can't go back to sleep. Not so much these days, since I am chronically zombified. Perhaps you can relate. Anyway, it is roughly this that has kept me from exploring Twitter. I don't want to be subjected to a stream of information I can't control and that keeps distracting me from what I need to do, namely sleep, study, or eat, which is pretty much all I do outside of class. Therefore, I was most gratified to learn that one actually chooses the tweets that one sees, one selects the tweeple (why isn't it tweople?) whose tweets interest one. This is a very good thing. I know a number of people I would gladly get some tweets from every day or two, MACers included! I can see how this could be a very useful tool for quickly partaking of the thoughts of people who interest me. I can also see how one could use it as a collaborative group tool, I think. The organization tools sound important. Yes, I look forward to grazing on the tweets from my friends and associates. From the Rainbow Guy...maybe not so much... "All the way! All the way across the sky...!!!"
I'm glad to find out that we can pick and choose the "tweets" we get (I can't seem to make myself use any of their terminology without putting it in quotations, I just feel silly if I dont) but I'm still not all that excited about the whole idea of us "twittering." I'm still waiting for that one magical classroom application that will win me over.
ReplyDeleteJulia
It was a real pleasure to read this post and see your thinking progression. I've been reading everyone's blogs and listening to the class responses: very ANTI-Twitter. And I wonder ... is it valuable for me precisely for the reason it lacks value for so many of your colleagues right now? I'm not currently in a formal learning cohor, and I don't spend every waking moment in class or studying education. I need the kind of ongoing learning with a network of colleagues that SMAC provides to you. Hmmm ... check back with you in a few years?
ReplyDeleteMonte,
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on being really glad that I can choose specifically the people that I'm able to follow and not have to be bombarded by much of the senseless material that I usually associate with twitter. While I think that more technology and information is usually helpful, sometimes I just don't care what individual people are doing at any given moment (although I'm already following Mike Hall from the Big Ten Network, nobody's perfect).
Monte, there are some excellent things about that little tweeting bird website. You're right, we do get to select whose e-bird calls we hear from. Imagine how that would translate to the real world: deciding which symphony of birds wakes you up in the morning! And some mornings, when you decide you can't stand those stupid doves any more, you can opt to mute their calls.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the "Double Rainbow" guy in this video has a Twitter page. And if he does, I wonder what his tweets are about. Something tells me he'd do a lot of retweeting..."It's a Double Rainbow! All the way across the sky!" Actually, his entire page is just that one tweet retweeted an insanely large number of times.
-Stephanie