Learning with the Fang

Spent an interesting day at education.au’s Jimmy Wales event in Adelaide. Did a little experiment this time – no laptop. no fancy PDA – just my trusty phone with sms. Used Twitter to ‘tweet’ profound ideas instead of taking notes.

All was going fine until Jimmy Wales noticed myself and the person sitting next to me (with a nice shiny macbook pro) twittering. He stopped for a chat and pointed out that he is a fellow ‘tweeter’, then proceeded to the podium where he glanced frequently at his pda. At this point, I figured it would be cool to try and set up a ‘backchannel’ into the event via twitter – so I sent out a tweet saying ‘if you have a question for Jimmy Wales, I will relay it at an appropriate time’.

Then it struck me!

The flaw in my cunning plan was that I was ‘WRITE ONLY’ I couldn’t see any tweets (event those sent direct to me cos I had changed them from SMS to iChat AV. Tried to hack a workaround by asking people to tweet questions to the person sitting next to me but judging by the e/mails that were waiting for me when I got home, I missed the mark – too confusing.

Oh well, maybe next time.

p.s. Thank you to the conference pixies!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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