schoolswork meets twitter

Sunday 15th Mar, 2009 by Amy Stock

We’ve finally entered the twittersphere, aiming to keep you up to date with the latest blog posts, podcasts, guides and resources to appear on the site. If you’re on Twitter, follow us here.

I know some people have differing views about Twitter, and I can agree with some of them. I read an interesting article in Relevant magazine a couple of issues ago, entitled ‘The problem of Pride in the age of Twitter’. I really enjoyed reading it, and one interesting thing for me out of that article, and thinking about work with young people, is that online we can create an identity for ourselves to be whatever we want it to be. You can carefully craft what you want the rest of the world to see, and almost believe yourself to be something you’re not. You can highlight the things you want people to see, and cut, copy, and delete the rest. When self worth and identity is such a huge issue for young people, this is something to be aware of and to help them be wise about.

Are we becoming a society who somehow need to tell others what we are doing in order to feel valued/accepted? Are we desperate to be able to tell our stories to anyone willing to follow us/accept a friend request? Are we becoming an iSelf society?

I think there are some ways that Twitter can be used unhelpfully, but also, ways that networks such as Twitter can just be another tool to help us keep up to date, informed and connected. I think, like with anything, if we place too much importance and value in it, we lose sight of what’s really important. But for me, and for us a project, we’re all in favour of ways we can better be connected with others who are doing similar things.

I’ve never really got into the whole Second Life or Habbo thing, but doing life online is an increasingly large part of young people’s lives. If they are spending more time online than having face to face conversations, more time online than coming to your groups or youth clubs, who are their role models going to be? Who are the responsible adults they are meeting, and how do they truly know who they are meeting in the online world? That was going off topic slightly, but I think these are all genuine concerns that we need to be addressing with our young people.
Some questions to ask yourself and young people specifically regarding status updates:

- why do I want to let others know what I am doing?
- are my status updates promoting something other than what God would want me to promote?
- how can I use Twitter/Facebook in a way that encourages others?

I guess this also opens up a new area which we need to make a decision about as youthworkers. I had the first young person sign up to follow me on Twitter today. Unlike facebook, anyone can follow you without requesting you to be a friend (unless you lock your account). I’m just deciding whether this falls under the Facebook decision we made (on team in Luton) to ban young people from our Facebook accounts, or whether it’s slightly different.

Just for fun, random twitter links:

the couple who got engaged on Twitter - http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/true-story-of-a.html
the twitter poem - http://twitterhandbook.com/blog/the-twitter-poem/
the twestival, a great way of integrating social networking with fundraising - http://twestival.com/
the twitscoop, a way of checking out hot topics people are tweeting about - http://www.twitscoop.com
the twitterholic, the list of top Twitterers (ranked according to numbers of followers) - http://twitterholic.com/

Anyway, this was just going to be an introduction to Twitter to let you know we were there! But if you do have thoughts or comments on this issue, feel free to add them below.