Social networking is not always a good way to network socially

It’s important to embrace technology, especially when you have the impression that you’re the only one who hasn’t done so.  So it has been with Twitter for me: just because I don’t feel the need to share details of my mundane thoughts with the world, doesn’t mean that it’s not without its uses.  In this case, for demonstrating that there are some things that are very tricky to do with it.

One of my class exercises is based on finding people in the Twittersphere.  Students are told to set up an account and familiarise themselves with the service: never assume that they already know this.  In the class, the task they have is to sit in silence and find all the other people in the room on Twitter: no talking, no notes, no emails – the only place that they can post material is on their Twitter feed. Once they find someone, they have to follow them.  When they have found everyone, they raise their hand.

What quickly happens is that students realise they lack the necessary information, notably who else is in the room (unless you’ve got a smallish group who know each other pretty well) and how to find out where other people’s accounts might be. It also requires everyone to know how to pull information from elsewhere (e.g. the classlist on the intranet) and how to push out useful information from their feed to help others find them (e.g. hashtags).

This is a great way to highlight the prior conditions for communication and negotiation, i.e. knowing who you’re communicating with and how to reach them. It’s also a good base for another game I’ll tell you about shortly.