I have found that using Twitter is one of the best ways to keep track of edtech people, products and emerging trends. The problem with Twitter, of course, is that as you follow more people it rapidly becomes unmanageable unless you break down the “tweet stream” into specific themes and not choke on the “fire hose” of information.

Following hashtag groups in your social media browser (i.e. Tweetdeck) is a powerful way to organize the flow of tweets into useful categories that you want to focus on. I follow a pretty wide range of hashtag groups in general but with respect to my edtech/marketing interests, I have a few that  give me a good picture of what I am most interested in. I thought they might also be useful to others, so here they are:

#arlearning – Augmented Reality Learning
#CdPSE – Canadian Post Secondary Education
#edtech – Educational Technology
#education – General Education
#eduinno – Innovations in Learning
#eduvc – For Edtech Startups and Venture Capital
#elearning -  Elearning
#gbl – Games Based Learning
#hemarketing – Higher Education Marketing
#highered -  Higher Education
#learnchat – General learning
#mlearning – Mobile Learning
#onlinelearing – Online Learning
#seriousgames – Games Based Learning

An interesting site I just came across recently is Edutweetups, a general directory of higher education hashtags. This is a recently established directory, (as of May 2011, I believe) and is still a bit thin in content but I am sure it will fill out substantially with time. It also provides directories of education conferences, webinars and tweetups.

My list is certainly not comprehensive, in fact, I would very much like to refine it, so if you have other Hashtag groups that you find particularly useful in this area, please reply and let me know what they are and I will add them to my Twitter Resources page on my website .

Scott Duncan

Cheers,

Scott Duncan