Friday 26 June 2009

Tweeting from a conference.

If you are following me on twitter you will have noticed many #comet09 tweets in the last two days. There will be more tomorrow as the conference finishes in the afternoon. So what was it about? COMET is an interdisciplinary conference in communication, medicine and ethics. It moves around the world and this year was on my doorstep in Cardiff so too good an opportunity to miss.

I decided to tweet because I thought the content would be interesting to quite a few of the people I know on Twitter. And it was. Some of the things that happened:
And after seeing a presentation about using multiple modalities in drug patient information leaflets I remembered that I had seen a lightning talk about this last week at Health Camp but couldn't remember who. I tweeted and had the answer before the speaker had finished her presentation.

I do seem to have been the only person tweeting from COMET 09, but I predict that come COMET 10 in Boston there will be a few more. This was not about providing a backchannel to the conference, but simply about bringing the contents of interesting dialogues to a wider audience. So if you are listening to someone stimulating, think about tweeting. The chances are that someone you know will be glad that you have made the effort to share.

4 comments:

  1. you were an awesome tweeter!!!

    Victor Montori

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  2. Seems we have both been lone tweeters at recent conferences. Despite the shared attention issue I found it a really positive experience and have had some interesting comments and conversations via Twitter as a result. Are you planning to share this with your students? Will you keep your Twitcast for future reference?

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  3. Hello!
    I haven't thought about sharing with students. I guess although this is a medical education blog, I would have said that this was about a wider contribution to the academic community.
    Re the transcipt- what the hashtag is super for this!
    http://wthashtag.com/transcript.php?page_id=2784&start_date=2009-06-25&end_date=2009-07-01&export_type=HTML

    How will you use the experience?
    AM

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  4. Thanks for the link. Until now I had just used http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23baotcot but I like your version - more clear.

    I linked to the twitcast from the BAOT/COT discussion forums, including the one which is open to the public so that prospective OTs could get a flavour of the professions annual conference. It has also been useful to share with work colleagues who weren't able to make it to the conf. Feedback to the OTs I work with is a requirement of the trust funding and this is another way to make this accessible to busy colleagues.
    From my own point of view its a ready made stream of both summary and commentary.
    It has strengthened some existing connections and made some new ones.
    It was interesting to chat with people who were interested and commented on me having a laptop, and then wanted to know more about Twitter. OTs are so bad at tech. Did your tweeting gain much attention during the conference?

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