Welcome to the Ten Days of Twitter online course, or as it’s called in twitterspeak, #YSJ10DoT !

Ever wondered if Twitter might be a useful tool for enhancing your teaching & learning, or developing your personal learning network? Not sure how to get started, or how it all works?

YSJ10DoT will help you to learn to use Twitter from scratch, build up your network and join in the conversation in 10 days!

You can take part in this course at any stage of the year.

Twitter is in many ways very simple to use – it’s just a micro-blogging social media platform on which you can post 280 character ‘tweets’ which your followers can see, and you can follow other people to see what they’re sharing. Sounds easy, and in fact, setting up an account, following people and sending tweets is easy.

And yet… for such a simple platform, Twitter is pretty complex. It’s not the functionality, so much as the conventions (@, #, RT, etc), the strategies for tweeting effectively and building a network, the plethora of ‘apps’ or third party tools to add on… Not to mention thinking about why you might want to use such a platform, and what you might use it to achieve, other than sharing celebrity gossip and what you had for breakfast.

At first people are often very sceptical – what could you possibly say that was of any academic or professional value in 280 characters? And why would anyone care to know what you are saying? How could Twitter possibly enhance your work in any way, other than a fun way to distract yourself from real work? To find out, why not continue to take this course.

We’ll be exploring Twitter together in 10 units. In each of these units, we’ll be sharing some information on a small aspect of Twitter, to get you up and running and exploring what Twitter might offer you. This course was initially intended to take 10 days for you to complete, hence the name 10 Days of Twitter! If you would like to complete the course within 10 days, we recommend that you complete a unit a day. However, it is also possible to take this course at your own pace.

Throughout the course, we’ll be focusing very practically and specifically on what Twitter can offer you. We have activities for you to do in each unit but none of these activities will take up very much of your time, so we hope it will be a worthwhile experiment for you! We’ll be interacting with each other too on Twitter, so you’ll be building up your network on Twitter very quickly! There are quite a few academics, faculties, programmes etc. on Twitter already, using Twitter to ask questions, find resources, collaborate on projects etc.

One important thing to remember: whenever you tweet about the course, use the hashtag #YSJ10DoT and mention or tag @YSJTEL so that we can find each other and your tweets. We’ll explain more later!

#YSJ10DoT got me back on Twitter, thanks! I haven’t used twitter for teaching as until now I thought it would mean getting students to follow me/following students. Now I realise – it doesn’t have to be this way! (Stefanie Allum)

Ten Days of Twitter for Learning Developers was originally adapted from a similar programme for STEM researchers, also created by Helen Webster. The materials are available under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA.

Ten Days of Twitter has been adapted by Technology Enhanced Learning for use at YSJ, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License.