My personal jury is still out with respect to Twitter, but the collaboration opportunities are shining bright. As I've mentioned in prior postings I've been quite impressed with the ETS (Educational Technology Services) gang at Penn State. I stumbled on this savvy bunch by surfing around in iTunes U.

They seem to be very enamored with Twitter. I'm not quite sure why at this point, but the best way to find out is to listen in on their tweets. I've set up the four folks who do the ETS podcasts as friends.

I'm not especially interested in most personal activities, but I am very interested in what they are thinking about with respect to collaboration, technology and learning. I was hoping that they might have assembled a list, web page, what have you, of interesting resources, links, and contacts. I wasn't able to find this page as such, but I'm hoping their tweets will send me in the right direction.(Yes, the blogs are a good resource, but more confined in a strange way.)

Many moons ago when I worked with people at Universities it was in the techie sales context. I'm not sure if the ETS gang is interested in what we are working on in our group at Sun, but blogs, associated comments, and maybe even Twitter are an interesting way to expand your information network.

Our group is currently experimenting with Twitter. One real change that we really haven't gotten our arms around is how public it is. Everyone shouldn't be privy to (some/most/all ?) our work related conversations. We  need to apply appropriate filtering.

Certainly twitter is more than a this is what I'm doing now vehicle, it's also a what I'm thinking now vehicle, as well as a really light weight group communications vehicle. Maybe there is a convenient way to twitter or IM to a restricted group of people, but I haven't figured that out, yet.

I work from home full time and what I most miss (from working at the office) are the unplanned and informal collaboration opportunities. I tend not to do my best thinking in a  structured environment.

Twitter is also fun.