Twitter: Useful for Learning?

I dabbled with Twitter for a few months--posted a profile, read about it on other blogs--but only recently--this week to be exact!-- did I make the plunge to engage fully.  One compelling reason was that I needed the texting practice.  I have teenage son that communicates with his friends almost exclusively through texting--and I needed to get in the game. Getting an iPhone helped--it is a much more text-user friendly phone than the one I had previously owned for three years. 

At the Upstate Technology conference last week in Greenville, SC, I got more involved by following Ewan McIntosh on Twitter.  Well..what a ride!--it started with one of his tweets from NECC to join a live session on ustream.tv.  From there, I found another SC person in the chat, started following her, sent out emails to some of my contacts, started following them, added some of the edtech bloggers I read such as David Warlick--and I was off and running--in a day!  (Must admit though, at first it seemed voyeuristic to look at someone else's tweets on their profile--but I got over it. I do wonder what it must feel like to have over a thousand followers--kinda like virtual paparazzi? Any comment from those of you that do have that many?)

Since Twitter is really just mass texting via cellphone or web, I have had many opportunities to practice this week, thanks in large part to the folks at NECC who used it to communicate.  As a newbie, I have more questions than answers.

Is it a good thing to follow fewer people than are following you? If all the people you follow are "heavy" users of Twitter, I can see that it could become overwhelming, eventually reaching a point of diminishing return.  On the other hand, if you have a lot of followers, it could be a useful tool for marketing--to drive people to your blog or ustream session for example.

Is it the quantity or the quality? Some of the tweets over the past few days have  ranged from "hi" to "join me in this session at NECC" to " I am washing my laundry." Is the world interested in mundane habits of others? Not sure except in a weird way I began to look forward to knowing how some folks were spending their time at NECC--living vicariously I suppose since I could not attend.  Is the number of followers you have or the number you are following as important as the what they are tweeting about? It's really all about the social networking--this question is also been asked about Myspace and Facebook--what is the quality of the interaction between friends you know and friends you don't know? Does it matter as long as your reaching out? How do we let this inform our work as educators?

Is it a useful tool for the classroom?  Texting is way for teachers to send reminders to their students about assignments, due dates, etc.  I can see teachers using Twitter to do this on a wider scale than one-to-one.  Students are dong it anyway--my son says kids are texting all day long without getting caught--so let's get past the restrictive cell phone rules in place at schools and figure out how to use digital native methodologies to facilitate learning. That will take a bold leap!

I have enjoyed my informal learning about Twitter this week. Can't wait to see if or how it may evolve as part of my new routine. I know my son will be glad when I get better at my texting skills! No more gobbledygook!