Kalinago English: #ttww Twitter Welcome Wednesday

this post was updated 29 April 2011

As mentioned at the bottom of a really rather long post regarding the current situation of PLNs or eCoPs, I mentioned that Richard Whiteside of I'd like to think I help peole learn English has had a seriouly awesome, very smart and totally innovative idea:

Let's help the newbie tweeters find other great folks on Twitter!

Here are the "loose" guidelines based on what we hashed out via Skype:

1. Each week look through your new followers and choose one -to five people you either know personally, professionally or who genuinely look interesting and worth following - folks you think your network might enjoy meeting too.

As much as possible aim to recommend folks

who have less than 100 followers

or who are newbies

.

As a general rule it's probably best not to recommend those who haven't bothered to add a real photo or listed a bio as they may well be spammers and do be very careful about those who've set their profiles on to "private" as they may not want to be listed publicly - some people truly only want to be connected to 20-50 people. **

2. Follow them back and if you want to, DM for permission to feature them in #WW - it could be rather confusing as a newbie to see your name lit up but not know why.

3. Send out personalized tweets - not lists - based on what they've written in their profiles. Add as many relevant hashtags to your tweet to help your PLN determine whether or not to follow them too.

For example, do this
#TTWW welcome @Craig an English Language Teacher based in Dubai, #ELT ~ interested in #dogme and chocolate. #TEFL
#TTWW @Jenny - she's a Teen Fiction author based in Ireland. Open to being interviewed by your students. #fiction #ireland #education #younglearners
#TTWW shout out 2 @Bob a good buddy of mine, help me welcome him! - #mlearning evangelist #edublogger and head of #edtech at @UniversityofMiami

But please don't do this:
#TTWW @Jenny @Craig @Bob @June @Alice @TomatoHead @eLearningGuru
as this is unhelpful to everyone.

If you want to recommend someone with more than 100+ followers, no problem - but how about doing this on #FF or #TT as the goal of this hashtag is to help newbies.

4. Set up a stream for the #hashtags which reflect your own interests within your Twitter client, if you haven't already done so. Whenever new folks with the same interests you have pop up there on a Wednesday, follow 'em if they sound interesting /you'd like to help them build their own eCommunities of Practice.

But I'd also generally advise that it's probably not worth the bother of watching the #WW stream itself as within the first weeks of this taking off properly, no doubt very soon after that, the salesmen and marketers will move on in.

Let's help Richard and the other folks who want to make this happen! And by the way, have yourself an awesome day, y' hear.
Karenne

**The pros and cons regarding the best size of a PLN is subjective and based on what you want from being connected with other people. In my opinion, following less than 100 folks means that you don't get access to enough information to make the Twitter experience worthwhile yet after following around 1000 it starts to become incredibly difficult to filter...and you wind up spending a lot of time creating different streams to catch people's thoughts, musings, blog posts. There are also those (I sometimes fall into this category) who tweet non-stop and it may look like there's no one else there! Also, I have to say honestly, that after you start reaching 3000 followers, you can wind up mostly hurting people's feelings because you can no longer see what all your friends are saying - well, that is unless you're logged in 24/7 and don't have a real life!

Note to Newbies: you can participate in this activity obviously, by RTng the #WW you see in your field of interest and why not share your own new followers with others too but whatever you do, please do not ask someone to feature you in #WW unless, of course, you know them quite well.

For those of you who are specifically in the field of ELT or interested in edtech and would like to have some suggestions on who to follow, the following lists are my own, but may well serve as a good starting point:

Note to CompanyTweeters: of course, you can participate in this activity - just keep it about others ~about helping Newbies to Twitter so they can find their way around the 'verse, rather than seeing this as a great opp to discuss your products.

No doubt, you'll earn you much more respect and 'hits' in the long run rather than if you fill our stream with inanities for a day or so!

Finding out more about Twitter

The English Language Teachers' Guide to Twitter
Using Hootsuite
How to use Tweetdeck by Russell Stannard
Learn English on Twitter
Other posts I've written about Twitter and social networking
10 Twitter turn-offs by Sue Lyon Jones
Other Links I've saved on Delicious

Resources on PLNs

PLN - what does it mean to you? by Richard Whiteside
Existential crisis by Darren Elliot
Is joining a PLN bad for morale? by Steve Dembo
The stages of PLN adoption by Jeff Utecht
An excellent presentation on PLNs by Corinne Weisgerber
How are PLNs affecting Education - an edchat summary of Berni Wall's blog
Video on what is a PLN by Skip Via
Video on PLNs + working with students by Will Richardson
Other links I've saved on Delicious

NOTE: update 31.03.2011 - it turns out that #WW is weight-watchers, wine on wednesday, weddings on wednesday and a bunch of other stuff. We POLLED folks and wound up with #TTWW