02.+Key+Features

=**Key features of the learning community ** =

Adult educators and learners are often not able to participate in a synchronous face-to-face environment or in learning commitments in real time for a multitude of reasons involving work and family, as well as geographical and physical barriers.


 * edutweet** is an online learning community designed to assist people in such situations and enable them to complete learning tasks. It is also designed to encourage participatory activity in a socially constructive learning environment. Though primarily focused on corporate adult learners and educators, it is designed to be inclusive yet flexible. With this flexibility, it also allows different groups of learners to participate in the same community yet use the framework for their own needs.

The focus of this framework is to encourage an interactive space where learners and educators are involved in:
 * asynchronous online discourse;
 * brainstorming and collaboration;
 * co-construction of knowledge;
 * evaluation and co-operation;
 * resource sharing;
 * development of higher order thinking using inquiry; and
 * increasing social presence.

The primary purpose of the community is to encourage members to promote each other's work by facilitating the sharing of ideas, promoting discussion, accessing links and articles, and supporting each other in the learning process. Although the philosophy of the community is focused on self direction, the members will be assisted by a moderator to keep the interaction flowing. The moderator will endeavour to bring equality to the communication as well as create questions and pose problems of interest to maintain the generation of ideas.

Twitter, one of the recognised social media microblogging services, is the primary communication tool and consequently the centre of this framework. It's incredible availability and ease of application will allow creativity and flexibility in its implementation for use in this community. Not only will the learners and educators be able to access the community from a variety of devices (e.g. computers, iPhones, Blackberries), the principles of brevity of messages and consequential speed of response, will allow maximum benefits of interactions. Such benefits will help accelerate the pace of learning as well as challenge members in their thinking and approach to learning new concepts.

It is recognised that Twitter alone has limitations in terms of deeper learning and for this reason, other tools will need to be incorporated. Twitter features that can expand the learning process include: The following image shows examples of the above features:
 * Tweets - send a tweet to your followers eg other members of the learning community;
 * Retweet - someone that you are following sends a tweet that you believe your followers would also be interested in, but you are not sure that they received;
 * Direct Message - use when you want to send a tweet to a specific person eg a moderator and not let anyone else see it (the person must be one of your followers);
 * @replies - use when you want to grab the attention of a specific person who is following you but happy for other followers to read;
 * hashtags - use to help categorise tweets and make searchable to allow people to find tweets about a specific topic; and
 * TinyURLs - used to shorten long URLs when including a URL in a tweet.



Additional tools that will further assist in deeper learning include:
 * Flickr and Twit Pic - use to add images to tweets;
 * 12 seconds - use to add videos to tweets;
 * Animoto - use to add their own music videos;
 * Twibes - use to allow people in the learning community to create and join a group that has a common interest or topic that they want to tweet about (eg the following shows an example of the edutweet twibe created for this community):




 * Today'sMeet - use to embrace the backchannel and connect the audience in a real-time exchange, to encourage the participants to make comments, ask questions and share ideas while a presentation is in progress (eg the following shows how the audience has participated in a back channel during a recent presentation).



Another example of a back channel in action is shown in [|//The Twitter Experiment//] - this video demonstrates how students from an undergraduate history class from the University of Texas, Dallas interacted during their lecture using Twitter on laptops and mobile devices.

Prior to joining the community, each person will be provided with information to assist in participation in the community including:
 * Guidelines for creating a collective [|Netiquette] (Shea 1994);
 * Learner Agreements/Charters;
 * Links to reference and training material to assist members when using the tool - this will include guidelines for creation of identities in Twitter, information to be included in their profiles, etc; and
 * General guidelines about using the learning community effectively to assist in the learning process and outcomes.

An important part of the essence of learning is the ability to link the community towards changed understandings and learning practice.