How I use Twitter

This post started with some musing about the meta conversations occurring online right now in twitter over hashtags.  There was enough activity that I was distracted for a bit and then I came to the realization: This is not why I’m on social media.

I started logging on to Twitter in January of 2015 after seeing some math posts on google+ that seemed to indicate there was a lot of interesting activity going on.  After a few weeks I was convinced:  twitter was a great place to find other people actively discussing mathematics and working with kids.

I started by monitoring #mathchat which has a mixture of spam/ads and real people.  From there I found #mtbos which was much more focused on teaching, has less spam and a more communal feel.  (This has become less and less true over time) Then, I started slowly growing my follow list of people who post interesting ideas. If someone says something interesting I check out their feed and if the stream looks fun I try out following them. Building this network has tended to focus the tweets and made the experience more useful.  For me, most of the interesting conversations are occurring person to person rather than on hashtags. Although compared to average I have both less followers and follow less people which probably reflects my own style for engaging with social media.

Also its important to realize, twitter is not monolithic.  That seems obvious, but sometimes because  of the volume of tweets someone produces or a particular network of folks you follow you end up seeing a lot of overlap. If that’s not useful to me, I just modify my feed over time. Lists are really great for this. For instance, I moved a bunch of traffic reports, news and politics into its own list and stopped directly following. Now instead of being overwhelmed by political news, I check in when I want to and my main feed is full people’s tweets instead.

What I’m finding over time is there are several different types of posters that I enjoy the most.

1. Puzzle and problem producers. These are folks like @gogeometry, @eylem, @cuttheknot, @five_triangles, @sansu_seijin, @solvemymaths.   They regularly post interesting problems that I like to try out and reuse.

2. Animated Gif Makers. There are a ton of really interesting animated math gifs being produced by folks like @gohio, @dynamic_math, @beesandbombs.

3. Individual Bloggers. These are folks who’s blog or channel I regularly read anyway like @mikeandallie, @hpicciotti, @fawnpnguyen, @mrhonnor,  @standupmaths

I’ve found a lot of sources for ideas for ideas about activities or pedagogy this way.

1. Conversationalists: These folks are usually less for blogs and more for the conversations they produce in twitter itself. @mpershan

The flip side is that twitter is not all goodness. Its very hard to express complex or nuanced ideas in the limits of a tweet. And then there are viewpoints out there with which I don’t agree. I’m definitely susceptible to the “But someone’s wrong on the Internet!” phenomena, especially if a person posts a lot.  So I try very hard to filter these out rather than responding most of the time. Arguments in 140 character tweets are not terribly exciting. In fact, there are even a few folks I stopped following even though I agreed with them because most of their time was spent in debates that were not useful for me. In the end, my mantra is try to produce the content that I would also like to consume.

Also in order of importance:

• Engage in conversations with others. Relationships take time to build so don’t expect this to bear fruit immediately.  
•  Use retweets judiciously and make sure your stream represents you not others.
• Talk about what you’re passionate about.  
• Don’t be afraid to tune who you follow.