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Last week I took part in a really interesting conference that was done entirely on Twitter. The overall theme of the conference was using WordPress blogs in education and research. Throughout the day presenters were given a 15 minute slot and then they could tweet out their presentation over a series of tweets. This usually meant they sent 15 tweets in total and then people following the presentation could ask questions or make contributions. As long as they used the conference hasgtag #pressEdconf18 everyone can follow the twitter converstions and make further contributions over the course of the day (or later if they wanted to).
Like most conferences there was a schedule of presentations including several keynotes from eminent scholars in the conference theme; Gurminder K Bhambra, Jana Bacevic, Mark Carrigan, Derek Roberston, Pat Thomson and Jim Groom. Hope i didn’t miss anyone! I was really busy on the day with my day job so could only dip into these conversations to see what was happening. I suppose that was the beauty of the Twitter conference – even though I was so busy I could still check out these presentations, maybe not in full but at least get a flavour of their content. I certainly couldn’t have attended a f2f conference or even have time to check out any online presentations via webinars.
My own presentation was on ‘Setting up a WordPress site from scratch’. I spent the previous couple of days preparing the tweets. First making sure their content was within the tweet character limit. Next, adding further links to relevant information, mainly other websites that included the details I could not include in my tweets. I also made sure all of my tweets had some visual content, either a photo, image or GIF. I genuinely found it surprising how much information could be contained in one tweet and thus over the 15 tweets the content of my presentation was quite extensive.
It is difficult to fully evaluate such a presentation in a Twitter conference. I suppose one measure could be how many people viewed my tweets. I’m not sure how accurate these figures are but here are my ‘Impressions’ (tweets sent that actually generate interaction or replies from others online):
Tweet 1-15:
1: 648 2: 263 3: 233 4: 383 5: 533 6:224 7: 232 8. 100 9: 380 10: 172 11: 266 12: 143 13: 164 14: 345 15: 214
So as you can see the numbers vary alot but it does suggest quite alot of people are checking out the tweets. Also, during and after the presentation there were quite a few replies to my tweets:
Many thanks to the organisers Natalie Lafferty (@nlafferty) and Pat Lockley (@pgogy) for a great day and overall the experience of the Twitter conference was both interesting as an event in itself but it also gave my plenty ‘food for thought’ about maybe doing something similar in the future Link to all the presenters Tweeter moments is here too. It would take a degree of organsiation but given my experience of the day I think it might be worth doing!
totallyrewired 