Home > LotD > Hacking Education, on Twitter

On March 10th Union Square Ventures put on a conference called Hacking Education. The idea was to get a bunch of smart people in a room to re-imagine how education could (and should) work in a web 2.0 world.

As has rapidly become the norm in such circles, there was quite a bit of tweeting during the conference. People sharing the most provoking ideas they heard, as they heard them. Best lines. Ponderings. 140 character riffs.

It was fun for onlookers who weren’t at the conference to follow as it happened. You just search in Twitter for #HackEdu, the identifying hashtag used in every tweet about the conference. But as you can see, it’s kind of a jumbled stream of tweets. Decreasingly relevant as time goes on.

So what if there were a way to make tweets about the event, historical? To save them, scroll through them easily, even curate the best. Annotating the aggregate. Hmmm. We at Squidoo have been trying this with our Twttrstrm project, which we haven’t promoted much yet and needs some more work, but is nevertheless the darling of many lensmaster-Twitterers.

Well, lensmaster and web guy extraordinaire Alex Krupp thought about all of this in the blink of an eye, and decided to try “editing Twitter” on this lens about the Hacking Education conference.

http://www.squidoo.com/hacking_education

He sorted thousands of tweets from people at the conference and organized them in a helpful, human way. His effort on this lens results in a readable, meaningful kind of report on the event, an overview page that won’t fade away as the tweets expire. Call it history, if you want.

It’s interesting to see what happens when people play Editor in Chief of the content on the web. Organizing it according to their worldviews, describing it, recommending it, and making it even more relevant. Sticking a signpost in the ground and saying “I was here, and here’s how I saw the world.”

That’s always what Squidoo has stood for.

But I wonder what happens when you do that, even more than you are today.

History? Success? Usefulness for others? Credibility for yourself? Expertise?