About the Assignment

Blogging is when people publish their ideas for a (mostly) unknown audience in posts of any length. Twittering (or micro-blogging) is when people publish their ideas in a much shorter format to a known audience. The Twitter tweet (the name of each post) is 140 characters long. Just as with blogging, one cannot fully grasp the medium without engaging with it. So, we are going to engage it over the course of the semester as use it as a way to connect to people who are in fields or have a general interest in areas relating to our research project.

• create a Twitter account that is not anonymous (just as with Facebook, Twitter values authenticity; you will not gain followers and people will not let you follow them without authenticity)
• create a professional bio that locates you as a researcher writing an article about your topic and a grad student
• add a link to your research blog
• add a photo of yourself or something that you feel represents you or your project in some way
• follow @billwolff, Writing Arts professor @christateston, former Writing Arts professor @dianepenrod and everyone in the class:
  • @AileenBachant, @MChrapliwy, @chaibarry, @dracmere, @jlhoftie, @purpleman2, @hardwickman, @distopyra, @angesusan, @ksharada, @krystlelw
• follow Rowan grad students outside of class, such as: joesabatini, @CollinsJess, as well as former students who still Tweet often, @aheartofstars and @BBwerner
• begin following people in fields directly related to your research study. You can start out by finding them by conducting searches at Twitter Search, Listorious, Google, and by seeing who people follow. You can also check out these two posts: Top 100 Edu Tweeters and 100 Professors You Should Follow and Learn from on Twitter. There is no required number of people to follow, but if you are using Twitter effectively, by the end of the semester I suspect you will be following upwards of 100 people.
• tweet at least 2 times per day until the end of the semester. Because we are using this for our research, we need to fully engage the process if we expect people to follow us (you might give yourself some time tweeting before you start following people in fields relating to your research).
• whenever you tweet something directly or indirectly related to class, add the #core2s10 hashtag to the tweet
• tweet an announcement of each of your blog posts including the link to it and #core2s10 hashtag; when tweeting be sure to use a URL shortener, such as http://j.mp. I suggest the following accepted format: New blog post: “add post title” include URL to the post #core2s10 Comments welcome!
• explore and consider using a Twitter-related app from here or from here (there are hundreds), especially Twitter desktop clients, Tweetdeck and Seesmic

Have fun with this part of the project. If you fully engage with it and use it to share information you will meet outstanding people who will enhance your research and your writing, overall.

Please let me know if you have any questions.