So I think I might be finally starting to figure out Twitter. I have been trying to climb aboard the Twitter train since January. I took my first step and created an account in February. (My twitter handle is @wendyriggs47.) I tweeted my first shy tweet in March, and was hacked a week later. Slowly my tweet-rate increased as we neared the HAPS annual conference and peaked somewhere during the middle of the conference. My tweet-rate then plummeted shortly after I returned home from the event. I’ve been trying valiantly to re-tweet the twitterings of Kevin Petti and the Anatomia Italiana crew as they adventure through Italy (@AnatomiaItalian), but until recently, I continued to feel generally baffled by the whole Twitter scene.
And then, for some unknown reason, everything seemed to click and instead of dreading my Twitter-time, I actually started looking forward to seeing who said what on my Twitter feed. I think it took me awhile to figure out who to follow and who to NOT follow. For example, back in February, (under the advice of my young brother), I started following the tweets from “Politico.” I’m not kidding—those guys must have been tweeting something every 30 seconds. I was horrified and overwhelmed by the massive quantity of their tweets and couldn’t even begin to sort through what things I might be interested in exploring more fully.
But lately, I’ve honed the list of tweeters I follow (bye bye Politico, hello Valerie O’Loughlin) and I actually enjoy checking out what is reported. In the last few days of Twitter-time, I found an interesting blog post on flipping the classroom entitled 4 Tips for Flipped Learning by Joe Hirsch, a fantastic TED talk on the adolescent brain by cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, and a set of classroom-ready case studies for A&P from the Life Science Teaching Resource Community. (Seriously?! How is it possible I’ve never seen this before?!) It is exciting to see potential like this and I’d love to see the HAPS twitter feed (@HumanAandPSoc) become such a valuable and dynamic source of ideas.
So take this week’s poll to share how YOU engage with Twitter.
[polldaddy poll=8211086]
As soon as summer vacation is over, the HAPS research tweeter will be back. Keep your eyes open for two tweets a day, reposted on Saturdays.
Anybody who doesn’t tweet but sees a research article they think our twitter followers should know about can send me the link and I’ll gladly tweet it for you. I’m also always looking for holiday-relevant A&P links, so pass ’em along!
Ahhh! Three cheers for our research tweeter! We love you Pat!
Dang! Now that I have the famous Wendy Riggs following me, I will have to up my game on the twittersphere! 🙂
Ooooh—I’ll be watching Val!