Do you use Twitter? Or would you like to? I love Twitter for the connections it helps me make, and I follow hashtags such as #DigPed, #CLMooc and #LTHE to help me to find interesting conversations. I often lurk in Twitter chats such as #LTHECHAT (which happens on Wednesdays at 8 – 9pm GMT – teatime in our house). The blog to support this chat is here.
The way these work is like this: typically one or more tweep (person who tweets) facilitates the discussion, announcing the theme beforehand and then asking a series of questions for other tweeps to discuss as the hour progresses. Twitter chats like #LTHECHAT can be exhilarating. However, they can also go very fast and sometimes they can seem quite overwhelming. So recently I’ve been experimenting with an alternative to the one hour chat – the slow chat. In a slow chat, facilitators nominate a 24 hour period for tweeps to contribute, and conversations unfold at their own speed. There’s no pressure to fire off answers immediately, folk can take time to respond as and when they want.
We thought it would be fun to experiment with this format, and our suggestion is to earmark the first Friday in each month for a #BoldChat. (Blended and Online Learning Development Chat). Each month we’ll announce a theme in plenty of time, and Vicki and I will be on hand to provide light touch facilitation. We hope you’ll come and join our conversation. You can also find me, Vicki and the LTU account on Twitter.
flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
A great idea – I’m not a great Twitter user myself and to be honest find the usual Twitter chats too frenetic so the slow chat presents itself as an interesting alternative. Looking forward to the first one in March!
Looking forward to chatting with you Anna 🙂
Perfect – will it also be between 8-9pm?
Hi Gillian. The idea of a slow chat is that it can unfold during the course of a whole day -so Vicki and I will ask the first question by 9am and conversations can happen throughout the day and evening.
[…] to Sarah’s previous blog post, we will soon be running our first #BoldChat session on Twitter. We find tweetchats really useful […]