POWER OF TWITTER - Interesting and scary Ted Talks video by Del Harvey who works in security at Twitter. The piece starts by talking about the explosion of tweets over the past 5 years; going from 2 million tweets a day in 2009 to over 500 million tweets a day in 2014, underlining the power that social media has everyday life.
She explains that 99.99999% of tweets are harmless and used for the right reasons and only 0.00001% of tweets may be harmful and treating, which seems a drop in the ocean and nothing really to worry about until she puts this in to really terms and 0.0001% equals 150,000 tweets a day, A scary thought!!!
"PEOPLE ARE WEIRD" is a consideration that she says she has to consider, demonstrating this by showing a tweet saying "Yo Bitch", which at first you could think is offensive and cause for concern, but local and youthful dialect may be a factor and this could be a normally acceptable greeting between friends. However the picture that was tweeted with this statement was of a dog using the laptop, meaning the tweet wasn't only not offensive but also accurate, leading back to the notion "PEOPLE ARE WEIRD".
Overall I thought the video was informative, interesting and delivered with a sense of humour, and open my eyes to the true power of Twitter and the volume of daily tweets. From a teaching point of view twitter can be an excellent source of up to date current knowledge and news, however consideration has to be made for the students safety and well being with the large volume of harmful tweets, even thou it is only 0.0001% of them!!
Worth a watch!!
An excellent choice and indeed an entertaining and informative clip. There are plenty of alternatives to Twitter that you can use in the classroom setting though if Twitter is not allowed such as Todaysmeet and Padlet
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