By: Eden Hensley Photos by Brooke Dennis for Alt Summit
Most of us are constantly learning, whether intentional or not. As we pursue our passions and share them with our readers, we often desire additional skills to round out our stories. If our strength is prose, we look to improve our visuals through design or photography. If design is our strength, we want to hone our writing and editing skills. And regardless of what we share, today’s ever changing media landscape, challenges all of us to keep abreast of new technologies and find more efficient ways to complete tasks as the platforms we need to be on expand and evolve.
Join the Alt Community tomorrow Wednesday September 17 at 9AM PT/12PM ET on Twitter for our weekly #AltChat conversation. We will be discussing how we keep our skills fresh and learn new things and sharing where we go to acquire and practice these new skills.
Sometimes lifelong learning can feel a little overwhelming as we search for the best places to learn: conferences, workshops, eCourses, websites, blogs, and more. But, know that this thirst for knowledge and passion for pursuing hobbies is protecting us against cognitive decline. And that we are in this together!
New to Twitter chats? Here are some basics to get you started:
- First follow @AltSummit on Twitter. Over the course of the hour we will be posting questions to guide the discussion.
- Open your favorite Twitter client, such as Hootsuite (or Twitter in two browser windows), or a Twitter Chat application, such as TweetChat. The first stream or window will be a search stream for #AltChat (be sure to select All and not Top). The second stream or window will be your Twitter notifications (the little bell if you’re opening Twitter)–these are direct responses to what you are tweeting.
- Before you start chatting, tweet to let your followers know that you will be participating in a Twitter chat and that your feed may be more active than normal. For example, Friendly PSA: My feed will be active for the next hour as I participate in #AltChat We are talking about lifelong learning today.
- Retweet our question before posting your answer to give your followers context.
- Begin your 140 character answer with A1, A2, and so on.
- Include the #AltChat hashtag in your answers and replies to other participants so that we can see your tweets.
- During the chat favorite any tweets that you especially like or people you would like to get to know.
- After the chat, be sure to follow or add the people to Twitter lists if you engaged with them and want to stay in touch.
