ALAO 2011: Tweeting @ALAOorg

This is the first of several planned "conference in review" posts reflecting on ALAO 2011. I'm going to start at the end, so to speak, featuring Twitter hash tags created and used for the conference and individual sessions. Tweeting during a presentation is relatively new to me; I remain somewhat uncomfortable typing while the presenter is speaking about his or her topic. Instead of my laptop, I chose to use the Twitter app on my phone as it's less conspicuous and certainly quieter.

ALAO is officially in Twitter as @ALAOorg; the conference hash tag was #alao2011.

Rob Snyder, Bowling Green University, shared a great Twitter widget during his spotlight session Timesaving Templates: Techniques for Quick Creation and Maintenance of LibGuides. Using the Twitter resource page, he developed a series of Twitter Widgets to consistently update a current events LibGuide.

With a Twitter account planned for the IRC, I was immediately intrigued by how easily these widgets could be developed and placed in blog posts, Facebook, web sites, and (of course) LibGuides. I spent a few minutes at lunch creating three Twitter widgets to follow the ALAO 2001 conference:


While a few issues immediately come to mind when incorporating this into a classroom, hash tags are social bookmarking and anyone can use them for any reason, it would be easy to create a set of tags - controlled vocabulary, so to speak - that would serve to connect a variety of library resources for students. I will definitely be exploring this option further.  Enjoy perusing tweets from #alao2011, #alaowebtools, and @ALAOorg!