Musings

Right after Learning2 in Bangkok, I was contacted by Craig Kemp (@mrkempnz) if I would be interested in moderating the #asiaed chat under the handle, @asiaEDchat.

Unsure of what it was, I had to go back to through some Tweets posted and found that it was a new Twitter chat. There are many chats around on Twitter, but I had seldom participated because of the time constraints on when the chat was. This one was different. asiaED was a slow chat where people had a chance to post answers to questions posed over a course of a day, with a different theme each week.

Coming off of the Learning2 high that reinforced the importance of learning communities, I agreed. I sent a few messages back and forth with Craig, and settled on the theme of Learning Communities. He gave me full control of what I was interested in discussing, and right after the conference it was perfectly fitting for me.

I drafted seven questions on Adobe Ideas (another take away from Learning2) on the plane ride back to Seoul, and shared them with Craig.

After getting the green light, I was contacted by Rob McTaggart (@robmctaggart) and he created these beautiful images from my questions using Canva.

Things moved quickly from there. I was given access to the account, and using TweetDeck, I scheduled each question to be tweeted four times a day.

Once it started things were a bit more hectic. TweetDeck really helped me in organizing and quickly viewing people who started following @asiaEDchat and tweets with #asiaED. As a Twitter chat newbie, I tried doing everything that I could that would have made my life easier if I had just started following #asiaED. Through the @asiaEDchat, I reteweeted any responses to my questions, tried replying to responses posted etc.

But, the best part of this whole situation was when I could see tweets in response to my questions were being retweeted and favorited.

And though I couldn’t capture all of it because it lacked the #asiaED hashtag, replies were going back and forth from some of these responses.

This experience also came with a set of challenges for me. Since it’s a series of questions over a week, some questions were getting almost no responses. I started wondering, “Was it the time of day? Was it the day of the week? Is it because my question didn’t work?” I had to get over my lack of self confidence over this one, but it was an interesting observation to make.

Also, though it was a twitter chat, when there is one question and everyone is responding to it, if you just follow the #asiaED chat dialogue, you can’t see the whole picture unless you are a participant. This is a quick sharing that was happening the week after I moderated.

Perhaps it’s my lack of what I can do with Twitter at the moment, but it’s in reverse chronological order. If it was happening to me, I feel like it must have been happening where I couldn’t see it as well.

So, all in all, moderating a Twitter chat is an interesting experience. I can imagine how different it would feel if it wasn’t a slow chat (there was a conversation on Twitter about this too!), but I would be willing to try something like this again, or moderating again.

But, the most important take away for me is how important it is for people to participate. The conversation can’t happen without someone putting an idea out there.

Here’s also a link to the asiaED chat website!