Tweets as Presentation: Reflecting on #pressedconf18

I took the opportunity to participate in the #PressedConf yesterday. Described as “. . . a twitter conference (#pressedconf18) looking into how WordPress is used in teaching, pedagogy and research.” it was a pretty impressive number of people and topics covered on Twitter in roughly 20 minute “Tweet storms.”1

Presenting on Twitter was something new to me and I tried to think through some interesting ways to approach things. Given how limited Twitter was I tried to tackle complexity in a few different ways while taking advantage of the way Twitter treats different content integrations.

The Post

I ended up deciding to build out a WordPress post with various sections that were associated with a number of the Tweets I’d make. I used good ol’ anchor links in the Tweets to be able to link specifically to those sections without having to resort lots of little posts.

For example –

http://bionicteaching.com/form-follows-function-wordpress-authoring/#custom

brings you to the Custom Composition section directly. Not very visual on the Twitter end and probably cheating in the scheme of things.

The Videos

I tried to tackle other complexity through videos. I made a number of new videos and took advantage of a few others I’d had to try to show more details. I kind of wonder if this worked well. They appeared in two different ways. Some I put in the Tweets directly and others were just in the main blog post. Views were pretty low – around 4 views per video for that time period and not much since.

The Tweets


This is one pattern I tried, a topic statement with a link to the section of the blog post and a meme to try to get some additional interest. There doesn’t look to be significant difference between links with memes from those without.


This tweet uses the video directly. It didn’t do much to impact views.

Data?

If I look at the fav/retweet information on each post after breaking it down by those various types I get the chart below.

It lets me know . . . probably nothing. The numbers are probably too small to really be very significant but it doesn’t seem like using the more visual aspects of Twitter made much of a difference.

Next Time

I think next time my goal would be to pull in other people. That’ll take a good bit more prep time but I’d like to see if I can draw people into the mix rather than just presenting to the people who are intentionally in the mix. I might also try to spin up some conversations that branch out rather than trying to maintain a flow of information that’s driven by me. Maybe I’ll get some Drupal people involved. Challenge some LMS fans . . . who knows?


1 Every term Twitter has spawned makes me shudder in revulsion.

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