I had a chance to chat with Brandon Grasley at the end of the OTRK12 conference following the OSSEMOOC “Getting Connected” session. Somehow we got onto the topic of new social media users adapting to the “fire hose” information flow of services such as Twitter.
You can’t get caught up in reading endless material. One must become comfortable with jumping in and out as time permits. Information can be tailored to your interests by using dashboards such as tweetdeck to follow topics of interest.
I decided to put the “jump in” theory to test, so one morning this week I looked at my twitter dashboard to see what could be noted in just a couple of minutes.
SUCCESS !!!
… an insightful blog post
… a digital citizen/digital literacy tip
… and a PD opportunity
Excellent results for just a couple of minutes of reading I would say. Here are a few ways to “jump in” that work for me.
– breakfast & twitter – I enjoy an interesting read to start the day
– tea & twitter?
– a few minutes between meetings
– lunch break
– waiting in the car to pick up your kids
– standing in lineups
Well, you get the picture. Jump in when you can and leverage on the go connected learning .
~Mark
~ Mark's Musings ~ blog.markwcarbone.ca 
Hey Mark,
Good demonstration – you can indeed find valuable stuff on Twitter or other social media sites in just minutes, and by retweeting/bookmarking/favouriting/etc. you can return to that content when you have time for the deep dive.
I’ve been thinking since our conversation about how best to get educators to take Twitter for a spin, and I think that jumping in and out is a key concept for new users. Thanks for the post; I’ll be referring to it in the future!