My linking to this is evidence for @Downes of more real interesting learning from #CritLit2010.
But it’s not just the shape of the network that’s important here; it’s also the semantic content of what we are linking about. (If we had drifted off into a classroom conversation about mutual friends in Argentina then the network connections might look stronger but it might not be so “interesting” from the course’s point of view.)
Perhaps some more direction about how to tag things in a coordinated way (beyond just the one #CritLit tag) would have made it easier for Stephen’s colleagues to extract the necessary information from our network activity (and also for us to get more immediate value from the course!)
For me the effectiveness of Twitter as a tool is definitely increasing as a result of participating in CritLit2010 (though mostly after the fact), and I am learning lots of other things as well. Perhaps my reading of the actual course resources has left me with useful mental hooks for conceptualizing these new skills, but I’m still not convinced of that; so I do think that a more practical approach (as in Maria’s post here) would have been more useful.