Tuesday, April 15, 2014

#GenChat on Twitter Last Friday Was Interesting

Have you participated in a GenChat on Twitter yet?

The genealogy chat hosted by Jen Baldwin (@ancestryjourneys) on Twitter (www.twitter.com) last Friday night was interesting, fast-paced and fun.  There were quite a few chatters for this regularly scheduled genealogy chat session.  On Twitter, users are restrained to a 140 character limit for each post (a tweet) so you have to keep up with the flow, plus write your own contributions.  I just used the basic Twitter feed with the #genchat hashtag and refreshed it a lot, but others use a separate program that displays the tweets as they are posted.

The topic on 11 April 2014 was "Confused About Citations."  Jen has put the entire conversation in a Storify post at https://storify.com/ancestryjourney/confused-about-citations.


You can scroll down the page, and go to the Next page when you hit the bottom.  I don't know how many tweets there are - hundreds, probably.  In one hour.  Everybody seems to tweet at once and somehow the moderator, Jen, keeps everyone on track.  In the process, she also asks questions for responses by the tweeters.  And at the ned, she provides some links to check out, and also had a challenge on her Ancestral Breezes blog - #genchat CHALLENGE: Practice Makes Perfect.

I participated throughout this chat, but always seemed like I was missing a lot because I was writing or trying to read the previous 20 tweets that I had missed.  My answers to several of the questions were late, and Jen had often posted the next question before I answered.  During the chat, I tried to help by providing ideas and links to source citation aids that I've found and used.  Near the end of the chat, Jen said something like "I"m not going to bother sharing links tonight, Randy"s doing it for me"  I didn't know that she was going to, and I apologized to her for that later.

These GenChats are another piece of the social media puzzle.  They may help draw younger researchers adept at social media into genealogy and family history by creating a community of people with technological skills and an interest in genealogy.

I need to participate more often...but if I don't I can try to figure out what was said and shared during the chat by reading Jen's Storify posts at https://storify.com/ancestryjourney/.  


There are 32 stories at present (click the "View all" link).  Do you see anything there that interests you?  Go look, read, and enjoy.

You can find upcoming genchats on the Conference Keeper web site - http://www.conferencekeeper.net/genchat-2014.html.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/04/genchat-on-twitter-last-friday-was.html

copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

Jen Baldwin said...

Randy, thank you so much for reviewing #genchat! I really appreciate your participation and your sharing of links! It's always great fun to have someone on the chat that has seemingly unlimited resources at their fingertips. Hope you can make it back soon for another one.
Also, if any of your readers are interested in learning about Twitter, I am available for coaching. I do this because I feel there is a great community on Twitter, and would love to see more genealogists take up that platform to share and collaborate.
I am so glad you enjoyed our discussion on citations. Thank you so much for sharing!
~ Jen
@ancestryjourney