How
are we going to be educating the twittering classes? No brainer! By Tweeting
our thumbs off. Of course the effectiveness of education has to be assessed and
Edu–Twittering is no exception and there is now a definitive study available.
Last
year’s Kidney Week was held during the week of November 8th and had
10,000+ participants. With their hash tag Twitter address, some of those 10,000
were able to work those thumbs, night and day, to educate, advertise, ask questions
or make wisecracks. Desai et al
painstaking read through all these Tweets, classified, evaluated, boxed them
up, and finally, reported out in this week’s Public Library of Science (1).
The
first surprise (to me) was that only 172 people of the 10,000 had
twitter-engaged thumbs so the size of the Twittering Classes among the kidney cognoscenti
seems rather limited, although they Tweeted at five times each on average.
Uninformative Tweets in the form of advertisements took up about a third of the
Tweeting space.
What
makes an informative Tweet? The authors homed in on three criteria. Firstly,
the Tweet had to have something to add to the Tweetee’s understanding of kidney
disease, secondly, there should be some internal citations (after all a Tweet
is not a tablet of stone which would henceforth be a self-evident factoid), and
lastly, an informative Tweet should have ‘positive sentiment score’.
Snarky
Tweeting is not going to be educative for the Tweetee except in terms of
education of the Tweetor likeability rating. The general conclusion was that
Tweeting is a good thing in terms of increasing informed awareness of
conference topics and can be usefully employed by any conference organizer.
Perhaps
academics should consider Tweeting their lecture bullet points out as they
reach them (clearly with a positive sentiment). The vibration of smartphones
all over the lecture hall might waken up those in the back rows.
