Twitterchat The Good The Bad and The Ugly

I joined twitter chat #edtechchat on Monday March 10 from 8-9pm after reading Lilliy Marshall's blog post: What is Twitter Chat and How Can it Help You in Fifteen Minutes or Less?

The Good:
There are several good aspects about Twitter Chat.  It is an excellent place to connect with other educators and discuss ideas.  Upon entering the chat it is clear that the main topic was about the blending online and face to face classrooms and their effect on learning.  There were many questions proposed by the moderator that were well developed and thought provoking, this helped to guide the chat in a general direction.  Users were able to share resources and ideas with each other in real time as well as answering relevant questions on interesting topics.  

The Bad:
In addition to the good aspects of Twitter Chat there were some bad aspects as well.  Mainly the speed at which the chat flows.  I found that the chat I participated in moved very quickly, too quickly in fact.  I found that I would read a question posted by the moderator and in the time it took me to think of an interesting and relevant response there were already 30+ responses, and by the time I got through reading the next 30 there were 50 more.  This pace made it very difficult to follow and be involved with. This pace made it difficult to even read all of the questions asked by the moderator let alone answer them. 


The Ugly:
The ugly refers to a few specific aspects, in particular the character limit and "troll" responses.  The character limit for tweets makes it difficult to express your self with clarity to some rather deep and thought provoking questions.  This results in several responses that are incomplete or appear to be disorganized.  Also the use of abbreviations short hand is frequent and if you are not familiar with it it can be difficult to understand.  For example I noticed the expression f2f come up in several responses and at first I was confused as to what it meant.  After coming across it many more times in different contexts I was able to decipher its meaning as face to face.  However in the time it took for me to figure this out I had already missed out on understanding many tweets and thus fell behind in the discussion.  Finally by troll responses I refer to responses that are too short to mean anything or are way off topic and clutter the page with multiple tweets you must read through. 

Overall I would say that it was a difficult and slightly confusing experience.  I think some of that had to do with my own inexperience with twitter and Twitter Chat.  Many of the tweeters in the chat expressed a great fondness for the chat and perhaps with more experience I will have better experiences in the future.  I think that there is a high level of potential for sharing information and communication with other professionals but there are some formatting limits to the forum.