I will be teaching Getting Started with Twitter at Kirkwood Community College next week (still room in the course if you want to register or to refer friends).
I will probably edit and update the getting-started tips I used in September for my Using Social Media for Business course. This course differs from that one in a three respects:
- That course focused on business use. This one will cover business uses but also talk about using Twitter for fun and information.
- That course covered all social media. This one will focus on Twitter.
- The Twitter section of that course was three hours the first night. This one will be four hours split between Tuesday and Thursday nights.
If you use Twitter, I’d like your help:
- What confused you most when you were getting started?
- What helped you most?
- How do you find Twitter useful?
- How do you find Twitter fun?
- What Twitter clients or applications do you use and how do you find them helpful?
- Send me some links to some of your favorite tweets.
If you are considering using Twitter (or opened an account and haven’t used it much), I would appreciate your help as well:
- What interests you about Twitter?
- What confuses you about Twitter?
- What would you want to know after a class like this?
For the first time, I will be teaching by using Kirkwood’s distance-learning facilities. Students at Kirkwood centers in Belle Plaine and in Benton, Cedar, Iowa, Jones and Washington counties will be able to participate by two-way video. I also am interested in your experience with distance learning. If you have taught or attended such a class before, what was your experience? What tips can you pass along? If you were a student in a distant classroom, what did the instructor do to make the course effective for you? What problems, if any, did the video/computer connection cause?
(My pay for the course is tied to the number of people attending, so I should disclose the self-interest in whatever promotional value this post has. That said, I should add that the pay isn’t much and I’m doing this mostly because I enjoy it and want to help people learn how to use Twitter.)
The Buttry Diary 
Hi Steve, passing along this link not for spammy purposes but because in it I discuss my initial bafflement about Twitter and how I came to love it: http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-tale-of-two-twitterers/.
The thing I would emphasize is it can take a while to see the value of Twitter and warm to it. It took me a few weeks of following people before its usefulness as a news feed “clicked” for me, and longer after that for me to get comfortable with using it as a producer of information and not just as a consumer.
Best of luck with the course!
— Jason Fry
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TWITTER:
MOST CONFUSING? Finding the right application helped me. The Twitter page itself is nearly useless. I finally settled on Seesmic over TweetDeck but that’s me. ||
MOST HELPFUL? Mashable with its lists of Twitter apps helped me find the right things. || Twitter for Journalists was helpful too. || Finding a few humorists and light journos provides some levity to all the other serious Tweets I follow.
USEFUL? Keeping tabs on all the changes happening below the radar screen by following diverse voices on MN politics, changes to journalism (too many to list), what’s happening locally (not much traffic here).
FUN? Besides the humorists, some great exchanges from journos like @NickColeman, @DBrauer and @BCollinsmn on state issues. || also like to see how people can use 140 characters to tell an insightful sort of haiku on issues of the day. Helps with my own writing.
DISTANCE LEARNING: I had a course once that was well done using a lot of variations on screen to keep the audiences attention. Just a lecture doesn’t work well with distance-learning. Even compelling speaking seems to need movements to other media such as powerpoints, video, etc.
Hope this is helpful.
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Thanks, Jim and Jason. I’m reading Jason’s post right now (and will tweet a link shortly). Jim’s comment shows how one size doesn’t fit all. I like the Twitter page itself and didn’t like TweetDeck (have not tried Seesmic). But on my iPhone, I love Tweetie.
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Hope you don’t mind my jumping on the self-promotion bandwagon with Jason, but I just-so-happened to have posted my “How I Do It” Twitter guide yesterday. Let me throw in some answers to your specific questions, too:
Most confusing: What’s this thing for? I joined up in July 2008, before Barack Obama and Iran made Twitter this must-have thing and I just couldn’t figure out the use.
Most helpful: Once I started searching for and following other journalists on Twitter, I saw the opportunity for professional networking and development, which solved my confusion issue.
Useful and fun: Like I said, I use Twitter for professional networking and I’ve managed to connect with a lot of people who I would have no access to otherwise. It’s very much been an extended education, as a lot of the people I follow are journalism educators and/or innovators. It’s a lot of fun seeing my network grow and getting feedback from these people who, without Twitter, just seem “too big” for me (your Jay Rosen’s, etc.).
Twitter clients: TweetDeck is open on my desktop all day. I use it for personal and professional purposes (TweetDeck makes it easy to do both simultaneously). Tweetie 2 is my preferred iPhone client.
Lastly, here are my favorite Tweets.
Best of luck with the class.
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