In the last few weeks I have stumbled upon a lot of discussions on “digital storytelling” in the media. In their Educause article Web 2.0 Storytelling. Emergence of a New Genre, Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine encourage learning professionals to use blogs and microblogs to create a narrative that captures the interest of the audience and encourages co-creation. You might wonder how one can create a narrative in a microblogging tool like Twitter with a limit of 140 characters per post? The authors suggest using short text messages to pose challenging questions to the audience.

Do learning professionals use Twitter to keep the discussion going after a learning intervention? As Jane Hart and Jochen Robes write, more and more learning professionals are using Twitter to share links and information “bites” both professionally and personally. I would be interested in learning how many of us are already using Twitter or other microblogging tools as pre- and post-work for our seminars and workshops.

Twitter is popular. Twitter hit 1 billion tweets last week. Are brevity and frequency the key ingredients of Twitter’s success? Short and sweet are in. The highly-rated book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, edited by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith, also points in the direction of brevity. SMITH magazine asked their readers to describe their life in six words. As the New York Post put it: “The brilliance is in the brevity.”

Photo credit: James Cridland

By Ute Milotich, 18 November 2008

Ute Milotich is a founding partner of Claxus in Zurich. She offers workshops and individual coaching to help business leaders develop presence and improve communication skills. Her focus is on training the voice, designing clear messages and using simple drawings to get the point across. Ute teaches courses in Instructional Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ) and the University of Zurich. She is certified as a Project Management Professional PMP®.