I signed up for my Twitter account this year, in June. The reason I signed up for my account was simple: I was attending a large, international conference in July and was terrified I would miss a lot of the information and sharing without Twitter. I was also terrified I wouldn’t be able to “figure out” Twitter unless I gave myself plenty of time to learn it, and a month seemed like plenty of time to me.

I went about learning how to use Twitter the same way I’ve learned most new technologies – I jumped in and mucked around. I started by following musicians and podcasters (as well as some celebrities) that I knew and enjoyed. This was a mistake.

After a couple of weeks I had fallen out of love with Twitter. What was the point anyway? It seemed as if all Twitter was about was reading what other people thought. I was missing that network piece everyone seemed to talk about when they spoke about Twitter.

The conference rolled around, and some of my first tweets were quotes from talks I went to (this actually ended up being helpful for tracking down some information later). I learned a lot more about the hashtag system, though I didn’t really “get” the difference between between a # and an @. Now, I think of a # as a conversation I’m adding a comment to, where I have no idea who as heard me. I think of an @ sign as tapping on someone’s shoulder at a party – they will probably hear what I have to say, but others might as well. (Am I wrong? Let me know in the comments!)

During the conference I started following more interesting people (including people I had the chance to meet in person) and was being followed by a few more people. I started to see two-way conversations happening – and Twitter suddenly made a lot more sense.

After the conference and before the new school year started there were a series of Twitter gaffs that happened to people I knew as well as myself. I’m not ashamed to say – I dropped Twitter like a hot potato for about a month because I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of the world wide web. After a while I realized that the Twitter community was pretty forgiving – in part because the information put out there doesn’t stick around too long. There seems to be a near-constant stream of information passing through Twitter.

In the last couple of months I seem to have reached a “critical mass” – I’m following just shy of 200 people, and have about 40 followers – and I’m starting to see my tweets getting shared out. I re-tweet articles I read from others or share ed-tech news about once a day. I’m very careful about my hashtags – I would rather share without a hashtag then share to wrong one. I’ve download and am learning how best to use Hootsuite – which is great because of the ability to watch multiple streams of hashtags.

Overall, my experience with Twitter and “putting myself out there” has been pretty positive. I’ve been able to build my online presence and start connecting with professionals in my field. I’m hoping that I can continue to build my professional learning network and online footprint.