Week 5 Weekly Report and Reflection

Biderman, A (CC) 2013

This week we were assigned to, among other things, create a Twitter account. Twitter is a great tool, in my opinion for a number of reasons. First off, Twitter is used as a social networking site and allows for individuals to connect with people all over the world through 140 character messages. This is the reason why Twitter was already apart of my PLE, under the "connecting" branch. Not only can you connect with your friends, but you can also connect with people with similar interests to you. For example, as an avid sports fan, twitter allows me to connect with other fans of the same teams, and talk to them about the sport.

Twitter, 2013

One other aspect that is useful about Twitter, that I did not think about while creating my PLE was the information that is shared via twitter. Information on a larger variety of topics is shared through twitter ranging from sports to politics. Not only can Twitter give you the information directly, but it also allows for you to follow your favourite writers, who tweet the links to their articles allowing you an easy way to know when they have posted something new. If I was re-doing my PLE, I may also consider putting Twitter in the "Gathering of information" branch.

Building off the idea that you can gather information through Twitter, lists are also a useful tool on the site. A list on twitter allows you to group a number of users in to one area based on a similarity in the topics they tweet about. For example, I could group all the writers for the Green Bay Packers (my favourite football team), into one list, and then when I wanted to read about them all the tweets by them would be sorted neatly away from the rest of my timeline.