For a reason I can no longer recall, I was thinking about twitter chats. Two, in particular, came to mind – #lrnchat and #chat2lrn – for one specific reason. And I think it’s worth calling attention to them for that reason.
They have a format that for an hour, questions come out every few minutes or so to the hashtag associated with the chat. And the participants answer the questions, continuing to use the hashtag. One of the interesting phenomena to me is that unlike many conversations, the answers can diverge as much as converge, and that’s OK. The topics vary, and in the questions and answers, you can learn a lot. It’s valuable to even see what the questions are, as well as the responses by others.
What’s fun about them is that people have fun with it; they riff off others’ posts in fun ways, they make silly tweets, and are generally real people as well as answering the questions. They truly are learning events, and yet very human as well. When you finally meet in person a participant you’ve met online, it can be much more familiar than meeting someone you’ve heard about, because you’ve interacted with them. And while the community that participates isn’t huge, the learnings and insights are, and percolate through subsequent work, eventually impacting the industry.
Not completely coincidentally, both are on Thursdays: #lrnchat runs pretty much every Thursday US evening (8:30 ET, 5:30 PT) for an hour, and #chat2lrn runs every other week at 11 AM EST (which is 8 AM PDT when the US is in Daylight Savings Time). What’s amazing is that they run!
What you need to know about these two chats (and others as well, I suspect), my specific issue here, is that they’re fully volunteer run. That means that a group of folks has to decide a topic in advance, craft a series of questions, many times arrange an associated post, and arrange to get the questions posted at the appropriate time. This is a significant amount of work to achieve week in and week out. And I know, because I was a #lrnchat moderator for a number of years!
So we owe these folks a big thanks for continuing on for a rewarding but effortful task. All these people have other jobs, but their contributions help all of us. There are other chats (specifically #guildchat, Fridays at 2 PM PT, 11AM ET) that follow the same format, but there the principals are salaried. Still, the fact that the organization provides resources to support them is appreciated, though they get some marketing capital as a return.
So I want to point out that the folks at lrnchat and chat2lrn are owed thanks by the community (and all the other chats that others participate in that are supported by volunteers and organizations). I salute you!
Hi Clark – pity you didn’t take the opportunity to mention #Ozlearn – Australia’s Premier L&D chat now in its third year. You may recall that you were also one of our early guests.
The primary reason I established Ozlearn was to provide Oz based L&D professionals an opportunity to interact on L&D matters at a time convenient to them – similar to your US based #Lrnchat held in the evenings.
Sitting there one day and thinking I want to participate in this chat but I cannot as I have a meeting to attend I decided to establish a similar chat for OZ L&D professionals. Even though I got some pushback from some of the #lrnchat folk, I persisted and did it. They say replication is the best form of flattery but some could not see that ;)
Onwards and Upwards for OzLearn Tweet Chat – held every Second Tuesday of the Month at 8:00 p.m. (AEST) – everybody is welcome !
Con, thanks for mentioning #ozlearn, as I’d forgotten (as it’s a time I can’t make!), and I had a great experience that time I was on. There’re many others that I see colleagues in: #pkmchat, #esnchat, #edchat, the list goes on, so I had to go to a limited list. However, indeed, cheers to you for making one to suit your neck of the woods, and here’s to all the others as well!