The Merits and Risks of Using Twitter for Professional Learning and Relationship Building?

Recently, I came up on two many conversations about the application of Twitter to support students' professional learning and language learning. So I want to explore more about the merits and risks of using Twitter for the two purposes.

As Dennen (2011) found, Twitter could be used to seek specific information about conference, and promote talks about all kinds of stuff about the conference thus enabling professional learning beyond the conference room. However, they found the potential downside of the application of Twitter was the sporadic and at times cryptic posting of useful information make people who did not take the conference at a lost and had no clues about what was going on. I think one reason is that Twitter has the limitation of 140 words. 140 words make most of tweets lose the background information. Dennen (2011) also found that people from different fields might post different types and number of tweets. For those fields like computer science, information studies, most people are early adopters of Twitter technology. I think different stages of adoption of technology greatly affect people engagement in Twitter-based professional discourse. Another downside of the application of Twitter interaction is that a large percentage of tweets are replies and retweets instead of constructive replies because most participants are not familiar with each other.
By summarizing Dennen (2011)'s study, we can see that Twitter can support us to engage in professional conversations with followers under a certain hashtag. However, the limitation in words make it not easy to pass complete thoughts or ideas to others by tweets.  Also, for some people, they are not getting used to the application of Twitter on academic or profession purpose. Another downside of twitter is that when followers for a hashtag are not familiar with each other, they do not often engage in deep conversations with others.

Taking my own experience in the course for example. At the beginning, I actively engaged in Twitter because I had something to share with. During these two weeks, I kind of left behind the twitter conversations because I did not have time to check updated tweets and share my ideas. I guess the time is also a big factor affecting students' engagement in Twitter-based conversations.

You can also go to this website, and check the pros and cons of Using Twitter. http://www.grosocial.com/blog/pros-and-cons-of-twitter/ I echoed with the following point.

• Twitter is busy. Twitter users generate 340 million tweets per day, and most users follow several hundred profiles. Because there is no Edgerank, if you only tweet once or twice a day, your tweets are quickly buried in your followers’ feeds.

  This is true. When you post a tweet and wait for someone to respond to you, your tweets are buried in your followers' feeds. This makes participating in a certain hashtag or handle a good choice to take to engage in dialogue with followers who share the same research interest with you.

I remember Michelle posted a question in discussion board: would it be better to use email instead than Twitter when we engage in a quite daily-life conversation with one person? I totally agree. Most of us have been used to sending email at a fingertip. Why do we bother using Twitter when we want to talk about kind of private life or topic with others.?

All in all, I think we should think thoroughly about using Twitter to support professional learning.