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1
Twitter @ KU: An Introduction
 
What is Twitter?
 
Twitter is a web-based social-networking and micro-blogging service that enables you topost short updates to your personal stream or timeline. Think of Twitter as combiningelements of Facebook status updates, instant messaging, text messaging and email. It's agreat way to keep in touch with what others are doing or thinking and to create smallcommunities.It's free to create a Twitter account and you can send tweets from your mobile as well asfrom an internet-connected computer or portable device like an iPod Touch. Depending onyour phone network
 
currently only Vodaphone and O2 in the UK - it's also possible to viewtweets as SMS messages.
Why are we using Twitter on this module?

using Twitter as one of a number of small pilot projects investigating the use of Twitter in higher education. The overall project is run by Tony McNeill from Kingston

Academic Development Centre and is funded by LearnHigher. 

in understanding more about whether Twitter can help promote student engagementthrough:
 
collaborative note-taking
 
the posting of questions, comments and reflections
 
resource sharing
 
dialogue (student-to-student, student-to-lecturer)
 
the development of learning communities

-http://blogs.kingston.ac.uk/twitter - or by contacting Tony directly via email -a.mcneill@kingston.ac.uk - or via Twitter - @anthonymcneill.  Tony is keen to find out more about your experiences of using Twitter and will be looking for4-5 volunteers for a small-group, 1-hour interview to be held in December 2009. Volunteerswill be given a £25 Borders or iTunes card in recognition of their time. The interview will berecorded, transcribed and used for publication. Data from all participants will beanonymised.
 
2
Creating your Twitter account
 
Creating a Twitter account is easy: just go to http://twitter.com
 
,click on the green
Sign upnow
button and follow the instructions. There are a few

highlight in theaccount creation process:
 

See if your friends are on Twitter
and deselect therandom selection of Twitter users you can follow on the
Look who else is here
 screen.
 

by clicking on
Settings
(topright):
o
 
set your location (Kingston upon Thames, UK)
o
 
your time zone (GMT, London)
o
 
put in a link to your web page, blog or Facebook page if you have one andare happy to share this information
o
 
write a 160 character descripti

 
o
 
do not tick the
Protect my tweets
box (i.e. stick to the default settings)
o
 
add a profile picture of yourself 
 
 

you (click
Picture
)
 
I

useful, although not essential, to register your mobile phone as this will allowyou to send tweets as text messages and, if either Vodaphone or O2 is your networkprovider, view tweets as text messages too. You can register your mobile by clickingon
Settings
then
Devices
.Once you have created you Twitter account we recommend that you visit the SpecialSubject Shakespeare Twitter account - http://twitter.com/el3668 - and click the
Follow
 button below the profile picture.

Special SubjectShakespeare on Twitter and that any posts made will appear on your Twitter timeline. We
dalso encourage you to follow your fellow students whose details can be accessed from thelist of those following the Special Subject Shakespeare Twitter account.
Fig 1: Follow el3668
 
3
Using Twitter on this module
For this module a number of Twitter-based activities have been created
.
The activities areavailable on the
EL3668: Shakespeare and Popular Culture
StudySpace module.Here are a few key pieces of advice on how to use Twitter when responding to theseactivities:
i) hashtags

hashtag:
#el3668
.
 
Using a hashtag allows users to

efficiently. It also allows twitterers to separate tweets which are about the modulefrom tweets about other topics. If you use a web-based application like the excellentTwitIQ (http://www.twitiq.com/

tweets with a particular hashtag in.
ii) @messages
If you want to reply to a tweet, we recommend that you click on the counter-clockwise pointing arrow that appears when you move your cursor over a particulartweet. An alternative is to preface your tweet with @username (e.g. @el3668) whichwill designate that your tweet is a response to a tweet that particular user has

to have aconversation in.
Fig 2: the reply icon
 
iii) adding links
You can type links into your tweets

he full URL (includinghttp://) for it to be clickable. If you want to add a link to a photo, we recommendusing a free service like TwitPic(http://twitpic.com/)that allows you to link up easily with your Twitter account as well as post tweets with a link to a photo from yourmobile.
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