I had a remarkable experience using the now-very-popular
online social networking tool Twitter at the Computers in Libraries (CIL)
conference in
The very cool thing was that by using the free Twitter
client, TweetDeck, I could have my entries in one column while following other
conference attendees’ tweets at the same time.
During talks, it was almost like passing notes in the back of the
classroom. This proved very helpful at
the 2nd day’s keynote. I was sitting at
a place in the cavernous conference hall where the acoustics were terrible and
the speaker had a Dutch accent. With my
hearing loss, it was especially difficult to understand what was said. By following other CIL conference tweets, it
functioned almost as closed-captioning for me, and everything was understood.
So, folks, I don’t think Twitter is yet “… another
ephemeral, noninformative tech plaything” (per an article by conference speaker
Greg Notess). At least in the context
of a conference, this librarian found it to be extremely useful.
A log of CIL Twitter entries by SIL attendees.
Gil Taylor
