Blogs on Social Media

This is the final post in a four-part series on running an edcamp unconference. You can find links to the previous posts at the end of this post.

Once you've taken care of all of the important things like securing a venue, finding sponsorship and assembling a team, there are plenty of smaller details to take care of. Some of these can be accomplished earlier in the game and some can be left to the last minute.

Today more than ever, people are capable of publishing their thoughts to a vast audience. Comments, tweets, and status updates are ubiquitous and constant. However, are we really focusing on the quality of the message we are putting out there? Are we really providing useful information or are we just adding to the noise?

We live in an incredibly exciting time. My recent visit to @jeffpulver's #140conf in San Francisco reinforced just how exciting a time it is. Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site, has quickly dominated the social media space. In a matter of six months, Twitter has doubled its tweets per month to an impressive two billion tweets. That's worth repeating: two billion tweets per month.

This summer I created a summer reading network that allowed me to monitor the progress of my AP English Language students. They are reading 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose and I have asked them to read and annotate the text very closely. I also wanted to monitor their progress by questioning them throughout the summer at varying intervals and compose a response journal.