the scoop - Mar 2012
Just a short one this month!
~Communication Tools~
Twitter was in the news last month after reaching record high levels of activity (a sample article here from Forbes). In that context, I thought it might be fitting to provide an update on the @brock_library Twitter account.
Since I have returned from leave, I have noticed a significant jump in the activity of our students on Twitter. I’ve been keeping tabs on mentions of us on Twitter by running a constant search of terms such as “brock library”. It’s not uncommon to have several mentions of our library in one day, especially when it’s peak season!
Here’s a recent sampling of some of the tweets our students are writing about us:
If I find a message such the first one above, I will often “re-tweet” (RT) it — this means the original message is forwarded to all of our followers. It’s optional to add commentary, as I did in this instance. At the time of writing, we have 659 followers.
~In the literature…~
Johnson, L., Adams, S., and Cummins, M. (2012). The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
This publication is part of a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education. It is a result of collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI).
Depending on your level of interest (or time!), they offer an 8pg, 18pg, or 42pg report. Or, there’s the 3:13 minute video if you follow that link above.
The report is freely accessible from the above website, but they ask you to create and account and log in. I have uploaded the PDF of the 8pg ‘Preview’ here, shared under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
I’m interested to hear what you think about our activity on Twitter and the Horizon report. Please feel free to share any thoughts in the comments!
Yay! I’m so happy you’re posting again, Monica! Your work on screencasting on this blog has really influenced my teaching this term - my students had a blast doing a “instructional video film festival” where I got them to assess and vote on 12 videos in different categories. And this discussion of Twitter couldn’t be more timely, as I hope hope hope to have to talk about expanding library social media presence soon in the job search:-B I like the way you’ve shown that you can still track usage, and retweet, even if users aren’t using hashtags predictably. Can’t count on everybody to use controlled vocabulary.
I’ve been dusting off the old blog too - mainly book-review/bookhistory/digitalhumanities related stuff. and some fun!
Thanks, Bronwen!
Your film festival idea is pretty awesome. You sounds like a fantastic library school instructor!