Last night, I participated in my first ever Twitter chat. My opinion: it was…..to be nice….different.

I found it really hard to follow what was going on and the general thoughts of the threads that were being posted and, as a result, did not post anything to the chat (but I did either retweet or favourite one comment….it was so busy I can’t even remember which I did!). I understand that maybe next time I will have to use something like Tweetdeck along with other tools like Tweetchat.com (which I was using to follow the conversation) to help me process the information.

Creative Commons Flickr image from Will Lion

Being overwhelmed by all of the information thrown at me was a very humbling experience. I usually pride myself in being able to multitask and being rather good at it but, last night, that ability was completely thrown out the window! At the same time,  I believe that this is a great thing to experience as a teacher as it allows us to be put in the shoes of our students. Some of our students experience this feeling of information overload in our classes everyday and it is sometimes hard for us to put ourselves in their shoes and realize why they are getting frustrated and shut down. I know that during #etmchat I definitely shut down and, even though I was pretending to pay attention to the feed for a while, I found myself thinking that “this is too much” and “I’m already so far behind, I might as well just give up now and save some of my sanity”. This feeling reminds me of a post I made on a blog I did for one of my university classes (which I haven’t posted to in a VERY long time) where I had the feeling of struggle in one of my university math courses (I believe it was on group theory….yuck!!)

This leads me to two new goals for myself to get out #etmooc:

1) By the end of the course, I would like to be able to feel comfortable and participate in a Twitter chat.

2) Learn ways to help my students cope with information overload and be able to tackle information when it comes to them, at several different paces. (Maybe not QUITE as fast as a Twitter chat!!)