The very first Twitter chat I ever even saw was the Twitter chat for #edtechbridge. I ran across it while planning to participate in a different Twitter chat for my INTE 5320 class (that second Twitter chat will be the subject of my second of these posts reviewing Twitter chats), and because it was related directly to educational technology—a topic that was an important part of my INTE 5320 class and my graduate program–I decided to jump into the conversation. As such, because it was the first Twitter chat I had ever encountered, and especially because I encountered it a few minutes after it had begun, it was an immediately bewildering experience.

There were at least a dozen (if not more) people participating in the chat, all sending multiple tweets for each question and replying to each other in conversations that sidetracked away from the main discussion. I was simply following the hashtag on Twitter in a search result page, and I kept refreshing the page to see new questions and answers (which seemed to work all right), but it took me a few minutes to get my bearings. I didn’t know who was even asking questions at first, as people would retweet the questions themselves before tweeting their answers (it turned out to be not that difficult to find out who was actually asking the questions—it was the Twitter account with the same name as the hashtag).

After I had sorted out the questions, I replied to the third question about the need for educators to learn new technologies. However, by the time I had thought out, typed, rewritten my response, and actually posted my tweet, the fifth question had already been asked! The pace of the Twitter chat was frenetic and extremely fast—seven questions were asked over the course of approximately 25 minutes (a few minutes being left at the end for additional responses). I found that I struggled to come up with answers and respond quickly enough to still be “relevant” to the current question! In retrospect, that wasn’t a huge issue as other people were late in responding to questions as well, and people were still responding to and liking tweets even if they were in response to older questions. At the time, however, I decided that I should focus on responding to questions that I knew I immediately had an answer to in order to be able to craft relevant and timely responses. This approach helped the process enormously, and I think it contributed to my tweets being, surprisingly, of an overall higher quality than I had originally expected.

In particular, one of my tweets received three retweets, a response, and six likes—including from the Twitter account asking the questions. It was a pretty enthusiastic response, and it also (I’m guessing based on the timing) led to me gaining another 2-3 Twitter followers right then and there. So, I believe that my approach toward the Twitter chat was fairly successful overall.

For a first Twitter chat experience, it was a bit overwhelming. The pace and number of questions was very difficult to keep up with, and missing the first few minutes meant I probably missed the opportunity to understand how the Twitter chat was going to work before jumping in and participating. However, this didn’t stop me from immediately participating in my next Twitter chat—immediately after this one had ended! That’s coming up in my next post.