A little help from Twitter
Twitter is a fantastic tool which allows you to post short messages online (140 characters max), telling people what you are doing. However, the main strength of Twitter comes from following others (and being followed by them), allowing conversations to develop between each other.
Today, I was looking for an online brainstorming tool. I know that I’d seen some in the past, and I thought that I had saved them in my delicious account. However, I couldn’t find them anywhere.
So, I posted a quick message on Twitter asking for suggestions, and within minutes I had four replies with a selection of relevant sites to try:
As I knew that these sites were all recommended by real people, it saved me a great deal of time searching through the millions of results on Google, most of which were not appropriate. Thanks to everyone who replied. The sites that were suggested were all really useful, and had a wide range of features:
I’m keen to explore them all and think about how these could be used in the classroom (especially as most of them have collaborative options).
On a separate note, what are we supposed to call ‘mind mapping’ nowadays? Brain storming? Thought-showering?
Twitter is really excellent as a tool that connects you to ppl with common interests. However, your post highlights a power that surpasses the mighty Google Search. I said yesterday to a colleague making an informal inquiry that I would tweet it, not google it. @digitalmaverick has also identified the potential of twitter to provide quality, relevant search responses faster than google because you lose so much of the trawling through many irrelevant sites.
Also, social bookmarking has this power if you identify users in the same line of work you can search your network (users of that site whose bookmarks you subscribe to) and see what they have saved under keywords (tags). Even without that network set up you can generally judge the quality (rule of thumb) by the number of times a URL has been saved by other people.
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I believe the people who have a stake in it (British Epilepsy Society or some-such) have no objection to Brainstorm as a term.
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