|
|
|
23 Juin 2007
Twitter as backchannel
During the MicroLearning 2007 conference we have been playing with Twitter as back-channel. The idea of a back-channel is that the participants can comment on the presenters, thus exchange comments and start a discussion among themselves in that channel.
In order to this a separate user (micro2007) was created in Twitter to represent the conference. Participants and others can follow that channel to get official messages from the conference. Subsequently these followers were added as friends of micro2007. By following this friends channel one can thus read what people say about the conference and presentations. The backchannel was projected on the wall in the hall with TwitterCamp.
This worked great for coordination and you saw people moving towards the conference, waking up and getting ready for the presentations. These friends should limit themselves a bit to only conference relevant tweets in order to prevent TwitSpam. And that worked reasonably well. We did remove a fried that was not present at the conference as his tweets were not conference relevant. It was seen as trolling. And as this was a international conference there was a problem with twittering in multiple languages. One should use a single language.
For many participants Twitter was new, however there was a good participation, i.e. people signed up. The actual backchannel communication did really occur and relevant discussion was created. Really interesting to see. It is however unclear how many people lurked in this backchannel. A drawback is that this use of Twitter might be heavy for the Twitter friends of the participants, they get to see a lot more traffic.
So in principle it worked. There was not much trouble with the time lags that Twitter introduced. Much easier to get people using it than IRC. Unfortunately Twitter was down the next day, when they were doing updates in the US night.