My second experience with a Twitter chat went better than first—even though it took place only a few minutes after the first ended! This Twitter chat was based around the hashtag #XPLAP (which stands for Explore Like a Pirate, and comes from the title of a book about game-based learning written by Michael Matera, who participated in the chat). I could tell immediately that the chat was about game-based learning from the conversations that were occurring and introductions being made before questions began being asked, even though I wasn’t initially familiar with the hashtag, and therefore wasn’t sure if this was related to the Twitter chat that our INTE 5320 professor had recommended. Regardless, it was on topic and directly related to what we’ve been studying in class, so I happily took part in the chat.

This chat had a much more relaxed pace than the previous one. I initially expected the pace of questions to be incredibly fast like the previous Twitter chat, but instead, six questions were asked over the course of 60 minutes, so there was plenty of time to think about how to respond to a question before actually answering with a tweet. In fact, it also allowed people to more easily have conversations with one another within the hashtag (I used the same approach as before where I had a search open in Twitter for the Twitter chat’s hashtag, and I continually refreshed the page to keep up with the chat). However, I was still working with the same approach that I had developed from the previous Twitter chat I had participated in, so I only responded to questions that I felt I had a good answer to relatively quickly. That being said, I still responded to four of the six questions. This time, despite having more time to respond to questions, it was once again a tweet that I wrote and posted very quickly that received the best response! One of my tweets was responded to by Michael Matera, retweeted once, and liked six times. In addition, Michael Matera followed me on Twitter! That particular confluence of retweeting and having Michael follow my Twitter profile immediately resulted in more people following my Twitter profile. In retrospect, I don’t think it was necessarily the quality of my response that resulted in more people following my Twitter profile, but the fact that Michael Matera followed me (even though we were all participating in the same Twitter chat). That being said, that was one of the most surprising parts of the Twitter chat that I encountered—people were extremely supportive of each other, the people leading the chat were responsive to everyone’s tweets, and it ultimately became a great learning experience where people shared tons of ideas about game-based learning.

Overall, I believe that both Twitter chats together were a great learning experience. I know now that there isn’t necessarily all that much in common between two different Twitter chats (as the two I participated in were completely different from one another), but that tons of great ideas can be shared in a very short period of time. That being said, the limitation of the Twitter format also means that it’s difficult to write in depth or develop ideas very much. More emphasis ends up being placed on the well-worded or witty responses, which makes Twitter chats seem to be more like classic business networking than I might have expected.