Gurteen Knowledge-Letter: Issue 98 - August 2008

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David,

Just a quick question re Twitter. You have created two other identities. Why? And, have you got any business from being on Twitter? Basically, what is the main benefit for you hanging in there?

Thanks Lilly

Hi Lily,

Its not so much that I have 3 identities on Twitter more that I have created 3 Twitter feeds in addition to the 20 or so regular RSS Feeds that I support.

1. DavidGurteen is my personal feed that I use to keep people updated with where I am, what I am doing, thinking etc i.e. the traditional use of Twitter.

I embed this "what am I doing..." status on every page of my website so unlike many other twitterers I tend to only twitter once or twice a day and do not use the in-built Twitter messaging feature.

This status is also automatically displayed in FaceBook, Plaxo and other social tools like FriendFeed which is very useful for keeping people updated on what I am about.

2. GurteenQuotes - this starts out as an RSS feed that I generate from my website (where I have over 700 quotations stored) and feed through TwitterFeed to convert it from RSS to Twitter format. People can follow this (subscribe to it in RSS terms) and get a neat little quote from me each day.

A Lotus Notes agent does all the work here - only selecting those quotes in my database that are less than 140 characters and thus fit in the limited space allowed by Twitter.

3. GurteenNews - is similar to GurteenQuotes except that I post newsitems to my site and an agent releases one or two each day to an RSS feed that again gets turned into a Twitter feed via TwitterFeed.

I plan for most of these to be short hot items i.e. "Google releases Knol" along with a direct link to the announcement. When I come across such news items it takes me less than 30 seconds to post to my website and so the overhead is not high. Again a Lotus Notes agent running in the background takes care of all the detailed work.

As for money, I make no direct income from any of this but :

1. the cost and time of doing this is negligible and the feeds provide a valuable service to my community.

2. it helps build my network - people get to know me and visit my website; sign up for my knowledge letter; get to know me even better and this is how I get my work and ultimately my income.

3. also, by following people on Twitter I get to know them better and this helps me develop and build my relationships with them; additionally I get breaking news in near real time and lots of useful little insights to what is going on in the big wide world.

So the bottom line: I find the Twitter ROI high. I couldn't imagine life with out it!

I hope this helps!

Regards David

• listen to them
• show them respect
• help them find their voice
• have conversations with them
• show genuine interest
• give them help and support
• engage with them
• trust them
• give them responsibility
• give them recognition
• give them opportunities for self fulfilment and personal development
• don't try to tell them what to do

My reason for wanting to see an integration of citizenship, sustainable development or multiculturalism in the curricula of universities is to enable people to learn in a way that is different from simply being passive recipients of preformed ideas. For me, education is about learning and learning is about change. So where we see the need for social change, for human and social development, which really is rooted in issues of rights, power and voice of people, then I think it is absolutely necessary for higher education to actually build the curricula upon these issues, not just to add them but actually to integrate them and use them as foundations for learning and teaching.

A lot of educative curricula, especially in higher education, are still based on the idea of transmission of knowledge. In fact it is what Paulo Freire called “banking”, and it is still very common that university teachers provide information, that is to say, the idea of transferring knowledge from the expert to the passive recipient. For transformative education to take place there really needs to be a much more experiential form of learning, for people to actually engage in processes of change, to try things out from themselves, to address real world problems, and to realize that not all solutions can be found easily. And it’s when you start to ask the hard questions and grapple with some intractable problems that you begin, perhaps, to open up opportunities to learn in a different way.