Future Trends Forum: Where Will Educators go after Twitter?

OE Events
1

It’s no news that social media, especially one rebranded as a single letter, is not what it was. I started poking at this back in April 2022 and we had some great waves of interest in the Fediverse.

But now we have Threads and Bluesky, plus more activity we see in LinkedIn, plus the dispersing of activity out into various collaborative workspaces (Slack et al) and messaging apps (Signal, WhatsApp, etc). Dare I mention Discord?

Many are asking this “where do we go” question, announcing their twitter exits. I turn to @mweller who had a 30 years of EdTech on the Twitter Diaspora and even more humorously but also insightful as Martin does with metaphors, a review of the “other” spaces as 1970s disco music tracks.

We’ve made steps here at OEGlobal into Mastodon and using it’s widget on the home page of our web site (the X one is broken). But we are not really quite exiting the problematic platform as, despite its clear ills, open educators are there (perhaps in falling numbers).

Okay, that’s the pre-amble. I just saw this panel discussion happening this week on Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum

What will Twitter-using academics do now?

How many students, faculty, and staff will remain on a troubled platform? What other social media services might they head to instead?

This week the Future Trends Forum hosts a panel of higher education Twitter power users to explore. The panel includes: Karen Costa, Lee Skallerup Bessette (Georgetown University), and Thomas J. Tobin (University of Wisconin-Madison).

:spiral_calendar: 2023-10-19T18:00:00Z→2023-10-19T19:00:00Z
:tv: https://shindig.com/login/event/aftertwitter

Where are you putting your social energy and focus these days? Or where are you not?

2

Hi Alan (don’t call me AI) :wink:

That was a very active FTF. Many BlueSky invites were distributed and I joined.
@mcorbettwilson.bsky.social

I used this Chrome app to find my X people on bsky.

I found over 200 and already have more than 40 education followers.
I have one bsky invite to share, it can only be used once: bsky-social-sdmjg-pwovq

Now we just have to learn the affordances and share them.

The_Thing_800x450
The_Thing_800x450800×449 116 KB

A blast from the Western106 past!

Mark

1 Like
3

Hi Mark, I read your post late last night in the UK and used your BlueSky invite code, thanks so much for sharing it :pray:. It’s another helpful little step. Not done anything with it yet but all ready to go @lesleyboyd.bsky.social. Will also try the Sky Follower Bridge that you shared. Cheers and all the best!

Lesley

4

Hi Lesley

I look forward to making another place for conversations around education. I’m glad you could use the invite.

Mark

1 Like
5

Hah! Late but replying now, Mark. You can’t go wrong with a reference to the mysterious Thing in the Arizona desert. It’s real and cannot be AI hallucinated.

I have some brewing thoughts trickling to my blog. It’s interesting, and while understandable, but I think also very wishful to want a Single Place Where Everybody Is Except for the Creepies. Twitter, at its peak, felt like that, but it was also an illusion IMHO.

For me, I am not sure I want to replicate twitter, nor am I eager to latch on to another commercial platform to spend my attention. What I do count on, is enough crossover from people who share from one channel to another.

I appreciate much that you drop in here as well.

And… oh wait, I see THE THING! It’s moving towards me, I better go and -------

6

Hi Alan
I don’t think there will be one platform for all, and all these new platforms don’t interlink. We do see people we know hopping across both private and public platforms. It’s a confusing and attention time intensive world.
See you on another channel!

7

I could agree more, Mark, and to me it never was at anytime one platform for all… that tends to drive things towards the spot marked by a single letter.

But wherever we hop and interact, I am assured mark.wilson is the same mark.wilson

8

And now @mcorbettwilson too!