Tweeting an event live

Once again, Bow Valley College and NorQuest College, were pleased to host the two-day Upgrading Online Conference for adult education programs, their faculty, and administration. The theme of our third annual conference remained "Best Practices in Upgrading Online," including best practices in "Instruction and Learning" and "Development or Administration."

This year we were also pleased to be able to live Tweet the webinars, as a way to interact with a wider audience in the online adult education field.


What is live Tweeting? All it involves is posting information on our Twitter account in real-time - while we are participating in the webinars. The information can be quotes from the webinar presenter, tips that are shared, links to websites and other resources relevant to the webinar topic, questions or comments.

Why Tweet live? One reason to Tweet at all is to connect with others who are interested in the same topics you are interested in. As conference organizers, we were promoting both our conference and the topics that the speakers were presenting on by tweeting in real time. Besides promotion, we were able to have conversations with participants even though they are at a distance. This became really important when it turned out we had a bad link on our website. We were able to update participants as soon as we found out, as illustrated below.

Who can live Tweet? Anyone really. We had a whole team of volunteers who took the time to share what they were learning in a webinar and post it to our Upgrading Online Twitter account (@UOconference). We were a group of newbies, some of us feeling excited and others feeling rather nervous about this endeavour,  but each willing to experiment with this new-to-us medium and add our own style.

On top of that, we had our partner @NorQuest College helping us spread the word by live Tweeting from their organization’s account.

And that wasn’t all. Some other participants, who were not connected with the conference organization, also live tweeted their insight. This gave us, as conference hosts, the opportunity to retweet them or engage in a conversation about the information they shared.

Want to try live Tweeting? As this was such a successful part of our conference, we will certainly need more volunteers to help us Tweet at the UOconference in 2014. Here are a few pointers to get you started:

• Research your presenter before you tweet, including knowing his/her background, twitter account handle if they have one, and other pertinent information.
• Find suitable hashtags before the presentation. Others may come to mind during the presentation, but it's good to have some appropriate ones on hand.
• Have a snipping tool or phone on your camera ready, so you can take a picture of any slide you want to tweet about [ensure in advance that the presenter is ok with images of slides being tweeted]
• It is helpful to have two computer screens: one to watch the conference and one to Tweet.

Are you new to Twitter? Here are some of the basics:

• A handle is the Twitter username; it starts with the “at” sign @. Our handle is @UOconference.
• A hashtag is a search tool; it starts with the pound sign #. Our hashtag is #UOconference. By typing a hashtag into the Twitter search you can find all Tweets sent by anybody on Twitter that use that hashtag. Some of the other hashtags that are relevant to the conference are #elearning (elearning), #adulted (adult education),  #abpse (Alberta post-secondary education), and #edtech (educational technology).
• Twitter, the microblog site, is increasingly being used as a collaborative learning tool in many educational settings. Here is an overview of Twitter in Adult Education and here is a collection of Twitter tutorials for teachers.