But, of course there are those who do not use Twitter wisely and get themselves in trouble. There is the infamous story of the person who got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted about it and, seemed to lose the job. It went down like this:
Even after this, you still see an amazing number of people post negative comments about their work place and other situations on Twitter. I think part of the problem is that people don’t realize how big Twitter is becoming and they don’t realize how public Twitter can be if their profiles are not set to private.
Well, now we are getting to a point where people are being sued over their tweets. I guess this was inevitable, but we entering into a new dimension of the Web 2.0 world. Here is the summary of the story:
Now, we know that Horizon is a “sue first, ask questions later kind of organization,” so I don’t want to get in trouble with this post. (Although this philosophy makes me think the tenant probably was in the right here.) But rather I’d like to talk about the idea of being sued on the internet.
Since this company filed a suit, I looked up what exactly what libel is to see if this was justified:
So, technically it seems this lawsuit would fall under this category. One aspect I am unsure of is if a company can file a libel suit. The FAQ above mentions when a person is wronged, but maybe it can go either way. In this case, the comment was made about a company. But, in this case the statement was definitely made to more than one person and it was clear who the comment was about. The question I guess would come down to whether or not there was mold in her apartment and if Horizon did anything about it. (Was the statement false or not?)
I think what blows my mind is the mindset of the management company here. Now, this tweet happened on May 12th, and the lawsuit happens two and a half months later. That seems odd. Why bring it up now?
Next, this news story, and their law suit is doing more damage, in my mind, to their company’s name than that tweet, that I never saw, ever did. I got the impression from the story that Horizon doesn’t even really care or want to address if there was mold in the apartment or not. Maybe this tweet was necessary and accurate. Continue Reading…
I feel like everytime I watch The Daily Show I come to the realization that everyone should watch this show in order to see the ridiculousness that exists in the world. He does such a nice job of pointing out the obvious contradictions of the worlds figures. (Of course, it helps to have a staff of people who must just watch C-Span, CNN, Fox News, etc… all day and tag and categorize everything that is said or done.) I feel bad basically just blogging about what Jon Stewart says, but they say that imitation is the must sincere form of flattery, so I guess that is what this is. I want to spread the word of the more hilarious stories he does.
So, on the June 18th episode of The Daily Show, Stewart reports to us how the house republicans are trying to compare what is happening in Iran to their own “oppression” in the house and they are both using Twitter to speak out. Here is one example of the ridiculousness:
I guess I see the point he is trying to make, but sometimes we need to put issues in perspective. The people in Iran are using Twitter because they have no other outlet to the world since the Iranian government has shut down their access. The members of Congress can get on the news whenever they want. I don’t think that Mr. Hoekstra was trying to trivialize the situation in Iran, but it seems like he could choose his tweets more carefully.
But, it’s not just politicians! After a great post on The Nation regarding the use of social networking to report in Iran, this was the response of one reader: Continue Reading…
I have recently become very interested in the phenomenon that is Twitter. I don’t know exactly how yet, but I believe that Twitter will, and is, changing the world. I started using Twitter in my classroom and in the letter I sent to my parents I expound on Twitter’s virtues, so I don’t want to rehash all of them here, but here is a link to that post which lists several of Twitter’s uses.
What I find most compelling about Twitter is its real time nature. As news or events happen you can find out instantly. This might be as mundane as your friend going to the grocery store or as big as a plane crashing into the Hudson river.
Tweet: Had to spend an extra $1 at #Ace because I couldn’t use my $5 “Reward” coupon for a $3.99 purchase and couldn’t find anything for $1.02.
So, I went to Ace Hardware to buy a switch for the basement stairwell. I wanted a black flat switch, which they didn’t have, so I got a white flat switch. The switch coast $3.99 and I had a $5.00 Ace Rewards coupon. I got to the register and the total was $4.27. The cashier informed me that I had to spend $5.00 before tax in order to use the reward. So, I went to find a candy bar which cost $.99. I went back over to the register and now I had only spent $4.98. I asked the girl just to charge me $.02 and she said she couldn’t do that. So, now pressed for time, I went and grabbed another candy bar. This brough my total fo $6.14 (I think) and so I had to pay them $1.14.
In the end, I got a $4 switch for about $1, but I still find it absurd that I have to spend the full $5 in order to use the coupon.
While implementing Twitter in my classroom I have been doing a lot of research about the topic. I ran across a good article today about teens and Twitter. The basic premise is that teens aren’t using Twitter yet because they are using Facebook to accomplish most of the other purposes of Twitter. When I even mentioned Twitter in class the kids didn’t get the point of it and they thought it was “creepy” to follow someone (as this post also illustrates) but it no different than reading your friends’ status updates. The article states that one of the biggest uses of Twitter is marketing (or self promotion) and most teens don’t need to do that yet.
I will go one step further and say a lot of the adult users of Twitter are people who don’t have Facebook pages and if they did they would probably use Twitter a lot less. Also, I think teens don’t use Twitter as much because cell phones are treated like a cancer in high schools. If we tried to embrace this technology rather than shun it, we might fine that we can make good things happen.
I have started using Selective Twitter Status for Facebook. This allows me to control which tweets I send that end up as my Facebook status y adding a #fb to the end of the tweet. I think this will really help me use Twitter more effectively. One of the nice parts of Twitter is the sharing links and other pieces of information that I wouldn’t necesarily want to make a status update on Facebook. This application is very helpful and is a good thing.
This is a questionnaire I distributed after the first weekend of the Twitter project. I wanted to see how many students were following me and assess how they were using the service and if it was helping.
This is an e-mail I sent to the parents regarding the Twitter project. My two main goals were to educate them about what Twitter is and to make sure they did not think I was trying to put their students in harm’s way. The letter got a little long, but I think it has some good information.
We have begun the great Twitter experiment, to test whether or not Twitter is a helpful tool in a high school physics class room.
Purpose: To determine if Twitter can be a useful tool in a high school physics classroom.
Hypothesis: Twitter will not be a useful tool in a high school physics classroom. (Note: For those of you who have not enetered the world of academic reasearch yet, this hypothesis may seeem odd. If this is your educated guess, why would you even bother? This is what is referred to as a null hypothesis. You assume that the change in the variables will have no effect and then you measure you data from that.)
This is the pre-questionnaire I gave to students before I started my Twitter project. It’s purpose is to assess how students are using texting now and if they have heard of Twitter.
