I sent an email to colleagues from ACE (Association of Communications Excellence) asking them how faculty and staff at their universities were using Twitter. This is a collection of their thoughts.
Ohio State
We set this ning site up for our farm show. Has face book, twitter, Youtube, and Flickr components. Worked great. Over 1200 friended.
http://fsrosu.ning.com/
University of Nebraska
Here is a neat article about a professor using twitter at UNL.
http://scarlet.unl.edu/?p=3613
I've thought about using it in my class, but haven't yet. Maybe next semester! ha! I would probably use it for the students to help them learn to write shorter, because I teach Tech Comm and I want them to write to the point, etc.
And, you've seen our IANR News twitter feed.
Iowa State University
We have a faculty member we are working with that seems to have found a very successful use for twitter. She is using Edmodo
http://www.edmodo.com/ to facilitate discussion among professionals in the field and students on nutritionist internships. My colleague Lesya Hassall is helping her.
University of Arkansas
At the University of Arkansas we started using Twitter a few weeks ago for the communication services unit of the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences.
http://twitter.com/bumperscollege It's grown slowly, thanks largely to some faculty who compelled their students to sign on after I delivered a presentation at a faculty meeting at the beginning of the semester. It's a good place to post links to news releases and other announcements. We publicize the twitter site's existence in our weekly e-newsletter to students faculty, staff and alumni and have a link to it from our college home page. We're still trying to grow the list. The Twitter guy at Tyson Foods told me that getting the first 500 followers is the hardest; he now has 4,000 but he has an international company to work off of.
North Dakota State
We used Twitter (floodinfo) to send updates about new resources on the NDSU Extension Service flood info Web site during the crazy times of March and April. Didn't want to use RSS feeds for every change since so many were tweaking the organization, etc. However, I tweeted when a new resource was added. Didn't take hardly any time, but I still questioned the value -- until a CNN assignment editor and local radio news leader started following us. And that was before we even thought to add a "Follow floodinfo on Twitter" on
http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/disaster/flood.html! Overall I thought it
worked great with very little effort. We just should have publicized this option.
University of Illinois
U of I Extension's starting to get into Twitter. If you'll look on our homepage,
http://web.extension.uiuc.edu , there's a link to our current Twitter offerings.
University of Florida
I know this will be past the deadline for your presentation, but UF is in the process of conducting a study on university ag scientists' use of social media, including Twitter, in their classes. Unfortunately, we're releasing the survey next week and won't have results for quite some time. But when we do, we'll be able to provide you with some answers. :-)
North Carolina State
We're not overly involved with Twitter yet, but here I have a few examples of NC Cooperative Extension Twitterers who aren't just talking amongst each other.
@ncce_news is NCCE's 'official' organizational Twitter account. Dee Shore is the voice behind the tweets. In the past 6 wks or so that she's been doing this, Dee has gained about 300 followers. I think Dee is doing a fantastic job covering the breadth of our work in a conversational tone. We automatically post the tweets to our public state and county web sites.
http://www.twitter.com/ncce_news
@benjaminchapman is a Food Safety Extension Specialist who actively tweets. Ben collaborates on the Barfblog with your Doug Powell and others, so that alone should warrant a mention. :)
http://www.twitter.com/benjaminchapman
@JeanineNCSU is an Extension Hort specialist who works at one of our research and extension centers on specialty crops. I believe she just started tweeting recently.
http://www.twitter.com/JeanineNCSU
@ITTOTD is John Dorner and Vince Verbeke's daily list of IT related tweets.
http://www.twitter.com/ITTOTD
Some colleagues of mine on campus at NC State started a nice aggregator of NC State University twitter outlets
http://twitter.ncsu.edu which might be a model for the future for similar aggregation activities that we might do.
What I heard at our session today is that most are using it for lecture reminders, event notices and reminders, alters that something they may want to see has been posted to the college Web site, club meeting reminders was a big one. But not a lot of substance.
Auburn University
Robert French (@rdfrench), a communications instructor here at Auburn, stresses social media including Twitter in his classes. He may be able to offer his own examples and point you to others using Twitter in classes. What is interesting is how Robert has used Twitter since Fall 2006, is that he has been able to engage students with practitioners. The results (the stories I have heard and observed) have been that students learn from practitioners and students have advantages in connecting and being found by PR firms.
http://www.twitter.com/rdfrench
University of California, Davis
Interesting. I use twitter for engagement, too. I twitter the Bug Squad blog.
http://ucanr.org/blogs/bugsquad/ The blog has drawn 425,000 hits in 88 countries since Aug. 6, 2009. What's unusual about this one: each one has one or more photos.
Oklahoma State
I am currently using Twitter and blogs in my Communicating Agriculture to the Public class. My class is for junior and senior level agricultural students. My students are required to Tweet at least twice a week and post a blog every other week. The final project in the course is a strategic communication plan. Therefore, my students are Tweeting about potential ideas, goals, and objectives for the paper. Additionally, they are also using Twitter to communicate with team members about potential references and resources by using www.tinyurl.com. This is the first semester I have incorporated Twitter and blogging into my course curriculum. Originally, the assignment was met with some resistance. However, I follow all of my students on Twitter, and I have noticed they are Tweeting about more than just the assigned class topics. Dr. Traci Naile (Texas A&M) and I are running a study about this type of social media. Should be interesting what we find out.
Purdue University
Earlier this year we set up separate Purdue AgComm and Purdue Extension Twitter feeds. The AgComm feed is where we highlight College of Agriculture news, often with URLs of news releases we’ve issued. The Extension feed is, in its current form, more a place where dialogue takes place between Extension specialists, producers, commodity groups and other stakeholders. It’s also become the place where we’ve tried some experimental “tweeting.” For instance, at our annual crop report at the Indiana State Fair in August, I posted about 40 tweets based on information presented from the report by Purdue ag specialists and the director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture. A number of reporters and farm broadcasters followed the tweets — including the Indiana office of the Associated Press — and some of the information posted wound up in media reports of the event. We hope to do more “live” meeting tweeting in the future.
Oregon State University
Oregon State University pest expert Robin Rosetta sends tweets on a daily basis to alert her fellow researchers and growers in the Pacific Northwest about plant pests.
University Groups and organizations
ACT
I'm the national ACT Advisor, and my national officers used it this year during our National Conference in Fort Worth to update students about schedule changes and upcoming events during conference. It also seemed to keep the student attendees motivated and engaged throughout each day.
eXtension
http://twitter.com/eOrganic_CP You can check out the listing at extension.org, organic agriculture. eOrganic has a twitter channel.
@AAEWranglers Science-based information from land grant universities; appears to be a system for managing questions not answered through eXtension
http://www.twitter.com/AAEWranglers
