Twitter for note taking #altc

Whilst I love sketchnoting my way through meeting and conferences, and have been doing some at ALTC this year, I’ve also been taking advantage of one of the features of Twitter. If you’ve not tried it you should.

Twitter has a feature whereby, if you reply to a tweet, the original tweet and your reply are linked in the timeline. If there are more replies to the replies Twitter will actually say something like ’11 replies’ between first and most recent tweets. So, here’s what I did. I replied to each of my tweets about a particular session at ALTC today, and I continued to reply to the last one I made, thus making a thread of notes for the session.

When it comes to your blog or whatever you do to curate your notes/tweets all you do is link to the first tweet and, when someone clicks the link they will see, in the timeline, each reply (and anyone else’s too) to that tweet/note. If you want to embed the tweets then select the ’embed’ option and co the code:

 

• Teresa MacKinnon – “Working together to face an uncertain future”
• Manoj Singh and Sarah Sherman – “Pulling the plug(in): dealing with a technical crisis by sharing knowledge, resources and experience”
• University of Nottingham’s Health E-Learning and Media team (HELM) – “Collaboration in the heart of the MOOC “

For this last one I’ll link and show the embed feature, so you can see my notes for Sheila and Alex’s BYOD4L session (something I’ve been involved in and would thoroughly recommend to you too), but also embed the tweets here. For this don’t embed the first tweet, but instead use one of the tweet note replies and you can select to include the parent tweet too:

• Sheila MacNeill and Alex Spiers – “Ch-ch-changes: from participants to leaders in an open online course”

Bowie references: the man and his music & what he did to popular culture @sheilmcn @alexgspiers #altc pic.twitter.com/ciX8pyD4cs

— David Hopkins (@hopkinsdavid) September 8, 2016

And another embed, from the same thread of tweets:

Audience participation key to development and growth to @BYOD4L @sheilmcn @alexgspiers #altc

— David Hopkins (@hopkinsdavid) September 8, 2016

So, why do this. Well, I’m able to

• keep the Twitter App open and active whilst I tweet my notes
• share my notes and thoughts as I go
• engage the wider conference community (those attending and those attending online)
• keep a record (as above) I can refer to (notes, links, names, thoughts, key points, etc.) back in the office later
• keep focus on the presenter and presentation

It’s kind of a Storify archive, but without using Storify.

Image source: Christopher (CC BY-SA 2.0)