A couple of years ago I had the chance to attend a keynote by
Marco Torres of
Ican Film Festival fame. In amongst his
many pearls of wisdom he said, ‘Know your Yodas’. For me these words meant to recognise the people who inspire, guide, extend, support and teach you.
Since my interests are so eclectic I was visualising an assembly of Yodas something like the Sergent Pepper’s album cover. My current album cover (or Ipod CoverArt hehehehe) would be a collection of: thinkers, cricket players, writers, musicians, photographers, friends, film makers, educators, poets, great leaders, scientists, artists, hackers and the picture would be constantly growing and changing.
Now with the advent of Twitter we can get to know many of our Yodas from the education world personally. We can have short (140 character) chats in real time with the people we ‘follow’ wherever they are in the world. We can: converse, challenge, argue, ask advice, organise get togethers, joke, lurk, direct people to readings or digital resources, call for Skype participants and even get to know a little about their personal lives.
As far as software goes for Twittering, I like the Firefox plugin Twitterfox. Using the Twitter homepage really doesn’t fit my work style. With Twitterfox each time a person adds a comment to Twitter it pops up in my web browser’s window. I can then glance down at it, give it a quick read and reply, go to recommended resource or continue working. Nice, convenient & relatively unobtrusive.
Twitter has become a nice add on for my professional development and it definitely has implications for the professional development of all educators.
So if… ‘ u rnt using twitter – itz where itz all at man 
’ – (MizMinh, 2008) it could be time to start checking it out.
cheers
Twittername = adrianbruce
PS Who are your Yodas and what would your cover art look like?
