Twitter Summit
Yesterday March 10th 2014, from 2:30 to 3:30 my Writing for Your Profession class held a large Twitter summit for scholars around the world. I was so pleasantly surprised with how the summit turned out. But before we held the chat with the hash tag #write4pro we discussed questions we would like that ask participants to answer. We came up with 12 different questions we thought would really make for an interesting and lively discussion. We also read up on blogs, and articles to learn what the most effective way to use twitter.
A lot of the questions we made were interesting but a few really stood out to me, and I was happy when the professor asked me to post one of the questions. He asked me to post question 7, which was the one that stood out to me the most. The question was, how important are social media skills for career opportunities in your profession? Does it leverage prospects? I was also happy when I got a lot of insightful answers about the question. This was one thing I have thought about before. Being that all these social media are fairly new there is a lot of people who do not know how to use them, and a lot the people who do not know how to use them are still involved in the work force around the world. I wondered if this something that major companies should teach their employees or is it the universities job to teach their students before they enter the work force. And what about those people that are in the work force that do not know how to use them, should they be required to learn?
I was surprised with the outcome of the discussion we hosted. There were a lot of interesting people involved from around the world. Two participants that really stood out to me were Maha Bali from AUC Cairo, and Mark McGuire from University of Otago in New Zealand. Maha had a lot of insight and very interesting things to say, her tweets were strong and that made me think about my views on some topics, such as how sometimes social media can be difficult because people from all over the world have excess to what you’re saying and in some cultures not everything is understood the same way as the person writing the information. Mark also stood out to me because every time I read something he had to say I felt as though it was such a strong statement and that he has such a way with words because I feel as though to get something so strong across in 140 words it a powerful thing. There were also a number of other participants who had great things to add to the conversation; even my classmates had such great things to share.
This was my first time using twitter. I made a twitter account just to be able to participate in this discussion. And I really am glad I did not only did I learn a lot from the chat but it showed me really how useful social media is. Also it opened my eyes to a different way you can use twitter, such as for business purposes. Before this I did not know that a large face paced chat was able to happen on something like twitter. But I will admit to me I felt as though I did get lost in the conversation a few times because it was so fast paced. Thankfully my professor was able to save the discussion we had so I am able to go back a re-read the conversation and see what I missed and what will be really helpful to me in the future.
I really enjoyed the chat and I hope I will have an opportunity to do it again because I really learned a lot and I really enjoyed learning from people I would not have had the opportunity to without social media.
If you are interested in reading the twitter chat click here.