I, Pseudonym —Part One —Adventures away from Teacher Twitter

For four years, I have tweeted and blogged under a pseudonym. This is my story, as well as some things I learned along the way. I hope people find it enlightening.

Teacher Twitter and Learning how to Step outside the Teacher Timeline

The Rationale and How Most Teachers Use Twitter

Like it or loathe it, we as teachers are limited in how we can engage with social media. Our Twitter timelines, Facebook status updates are something we need to use with caution and pause, lest people in the community discover something on one of those profiles that would be hard to explain. I’m not talking here about personal relationship related activity necessarily — I’m speaking about views. Whether it be particular political views, views on morality, sometimes having a view on various issues can put us at odds with community expectations we didn’t knew existed until after we have triggered some kind of response. The problem that lay with teachers therefore is that we don’t really engage with social media with the depth or sophistication of many in the community. The way teachers seem to work with social media can be summarised thus:

• Discussing learning and teaching related issues
• Some reference to our personal life, but little outside the “I’m enjoying shopping / coffee / I’m on the train” variety
• Some views on teaching and politics, but usually nothing overly controversial.
• Getting together during an evening and chatting about issues gathered around a particular hashtag, such as #ozeduchat or suchlike.

As a result of this, my timeline of teacher tweeps is often pretty quiet — almost dead — especially when there’s breaking news or some kind of Twitter storm in the morning or afternoon. Even during most evenings, there isn’t a lot of activity. There’s a number of reasons for this, I suspect

• Teachers are usually with their own families or marking or some such during my afternoon commute — and are never on during my morning commute. (There aren’t many out there who catch a train to school like I do, it seems.)
• Most teachers don’t tweet very much at all. They will engage with the hashtag chats, but that’s about it
• There are many in schools who look down on regular, frequent tweeters — “how do you have the time to do that” is a common insult, inferring that teachers are doing something unimportant while the accuser is busy doing IMPORTANT things (like watching The Bachelor or MasterChef, which would be their next topic of conversation). This kind of attitude would stop some teachers from engaging.
• Daily routines didn’t include frequent social interaction with others, and many are reluctant to change their habits

The almost inevitable result has been that many of the ideas expressed on such hashtags have not changed all that much for the last 4 years. It’s also been interesting to talk to teachers off line about perceptions of those who tweet frequently. It’s a fairly divisive issue. You won’t see teachers online live tweeting their reactions to things, for example, like #TheBachelorAU, #Masterchef or a current political news story. They are probably anticipating the inevitable “gee you tweet a lot” implied insult for work colleagues.

One of the problems therefore is that while we as teachers can engage with other teachers on Twitter, we don’t get a picture of the wider world. We, on the whole, don’t pick up on new ideas, ways of communicating, the latest ideas. Our students, however, are doing that. They are engaging on social media in ways that are frequently changing and evolving. They are making mistakes, learning, growing, picking up communication habits that we as teachers aren’t, because we are choosing set times to engage on a limited level. We should be able to go out into the world and do all of those things, to pick up exactly what things our students know that we don’t. It’s easy to pick up, for example, the confusion of most teachers whenever memes, trending topics and Buzzfeed are mentioned. (Then comes the inevitable “Ah, what the kids like. Who has time to work out what they like?) I didn’t start the pseudonym in order to do these things — I’m not all that wise. I did it because I was angry at the lies being told on Twitter about the Building the Education Revolution (BER) and the Digital Education Revolution (DER) policies of the Rudd Government. I wanted to correct the statements being frequently made on the #auspol hashtag. I quickly realised that my teacher account was not the thing to be using for that purpose. So, like a lot of others on #auspol, I chose a pseudonym. Preston Towers was named for the street on which I was living at the time — the Towers was a jokey reference to our 2 story apartment building. Preston has ever since had a place in my heart — my then partner (now wife) and I visited Preston when we went to England in 2012.

Geared with the hastily named pseudonym, I got stuck in. It was after that I started to learn about how Twitter was working outside teacher circles.

#Auspol and the 2010 Election

I was, for the first part of my pseudonymous life, one of a crew of people tweeting facts and figures in response to the lies raining forth on #auspol. There are those who these days claim that these organised groups of people tweeting the same message don’t exist on the “left” of politics, but they do on various sides of politics — you quickly pick up the talking points of the day and will retweet whatever fact, picture or message comes across #auspol and go for it.

It was fun for a while, engaging in almost hand to hand (or should that be slogan to slogan) contact with your opposite numbers. In that, Twitter becomes as close to a free sporting event one can do from the comfort of one’s loungeroom. That became dull and repetitive pretty swiftly though, especially after the August 2010 election. So I stopped and thought about what I actually wanted to do with this account.

It occurred to me that perhaps I should try to say something interesting and different to the range of slogans and comments flying around on #auspol. It was also very clear that during the 2010 Federal Election that the coverage of places outside the inner cities and Canberra was pretty slight and verged on the stereotyped frequently.

This stereotyping of outer suburbs had annoyed me for some time, especially as I was a subscriber to the Sydney Morning Herald for many years and almost never read positive stories about the outer suburbs, nor read reviews of restaurants or had even seen articles in Domain about anything much west of Strathfield. I put it down to the regular subscribing readership of the Herald, which wasn’t very large in Campbelltown, where I lived for many years and had unending problems with newsagents never understanding why someone wanted the HERALD not the Telegraph delivered to their front door.

I figured that I might as well start tweeting things about where I lived and see if anyone on Twitter was interested. That was pretty much my goal. I had no idea how to do that, except just starting to work out how to follow and be followed.

Building a Following List on Twitter

One of the greatest pieces of advice I have read on Twitter was written by Malcolm Farnsworth, a former teacher who started the outstanding archive that is AustralianPolitics.com, which contains all sorts of treasures about our political history. He said that the real worth of twitter is in the following list you make — and that the list really needed careful scrutiny. He would give other Twitter users (henceforth tweeps) a trial period and then stop following if they didn’t really provide what he wanted. (He gave me such a trial, and I didn’t measure up — I respected him too much to ask why.) (On another note, I continue to be deeply saddened at the fact Farnsworth is unemployed and homeless at the current time and wonder how this could possibly happen).

So it went that I assembled a list of people to follow and found journalists that I had seen on TV, read in the paper or heard on the radio and then saw whom they either followed or retweeted. That was quite a lengthy process, but ultimately rewarding as I discovered who the most reliable, insightful people were and who weren’t really all that good. I also discovered quickly who were the funny tweeps, nice tweeps, friendly tweeps were and followed them. After a while, I had a pretty interesting and varied timeline.

All the while of doing that, I tweeted and found that there were three big ways of gathering followers:

• Say something new / different / funny / insightful / pithy / concise
• Respond to people who respond to you
• Contribute tweets during big TV events where there’s heavy use of hashtags, such as #qanda.

I found that it was the Q and A hashtag that probably gathered the most followers in the first place, probably because it was still relatively early days for Q and A and it was a hive of political tragics like me, all competing for the pithiest statement to be RTed and/or placed on the screen. It was fun too in those days.

After gathering a few followers, then I found it was a matter of keeping up the tweets, contributing thoughts whenever something big was happening in politics. I also found myself asking questions of various journalists from various news organisations — some more harsh in tone than others, I’ll admit, but I thought it was a good way to see how journalists work.

Journalists and Twitter

As an aside, it is true that a number of teachers are frustrated journalists and / or writers, wishing that they could write all day and have an audience outside the confines of classrooms. This could be said for me, except that I have no desire to work in the media full time, for a few solid reasons

• I did work experience in a suburban newspaper at the age of 16. When I saw them leap about because Terry Metherell didn’t like an article of theirs, I thought that they lived an odd experience.
• I realised early on in my career that I like teaching and helping people understand stuff in person, rather than trying to engage a remote and varied audience on a permanent basis
• Having to produce words when you don’t want to would be horrible for me

Having Twitter, though, gave me a chance to find out exactly why journalists do what they do and why they do it. For that, Twitter has been an invaluable tool for my teaching. Whenever I teach texts relating to political events and media in general, I have been able to impart all sorts of insights into the gathering skills and activities of journos.

On that issue, one of the most important and enjoyable parts of developing a Twitter persona was in engaging with journalists and others, having a social interaction one could never have had in previous days, when journalists would write their stories, go to the pub for a quiet one then head off to wherever they lived / socialised. Now here they were, talking to regular people.

What I discovered in this interaction was that journalists have a variety of approaches to Twitter and the interaction with regular people. I have realised that it must be tough to have regular engagement with members of one’s audience who are particularly well informed and quick to judge one’s work harshly — I don’t think I could work under such conditions. I have seen, in the past four years, a variety of approaches from journalists and columnists to various tweeps (these are four broad ones — there’s other smaller sub groupings):

• Respectful, patient and warm. These are usually experienced journos who understand the frustrations of some, and will act with respect and calm in response to them. They will also act in a personable and considerate way with others, engaging on a meaningful and often warm level with a range of different people. I’ll call this the Mark Colvin / Jonathon Green / Katharine Murphy / Bridie Jabour approach to Twitter. (There are many others in this category) It still to this day surprises me that people like this followed me, some nobody teacher from the outer suburbs with nothing much to offer but opinions and a few tales from my personal experience.
• Polite but Sparse in Response. These are journalists who clearly don’t have as much time or interest in engaging and will only respond to one or two questions — being polite, but not detailed in answering. For them, Twitter is a chance for them to broadcast what they have written and answer some queries in regards their work, but then they will go back to just looking at their twitter feed and tick off that they have engaged with the general public. (I’m not naming names here — this is not that kind of memoir).
• Cliquey and Arrogant — or The Non Responders These were journalists that would talk to their fellow journalists and a select club of non journalists they found funny / engaging. They would rarely — if ever — answer questions or engage with those who didn’t make their criteria of “interesting”. They also liked to communicate to each other with subtweets that meant something to them, but no-one else. This is not to say that these people should be engaging with people they didn’t like / find much in common with. After all, every profession has this category of people. All playgrounds have this category of people.
• Rude and Hypocritical. The higher one goes in the food chain of media stars and opinion shapers, the more rudeness one can find. In my experience of Twitter, it was a select few columnists and commentators on TV that were unwilling to engage with people unless it was to insult, mock or belittle. And then block when tweeps would object to that treatment. Curiously, it was often people who tried assiduously to assemble a nice “everyday person” persona who were the most rude and abusive.

Twitter Cliques

These categories, however, did not just apply to journalists. Over the four years of my Twitter experience, there were new people emerging that were tweeting and writing opinion on blog sites. I was one of those, writing my own blog and contributing to those started by others. However, what was interesting was that bloggers and tweeps with ever growing followings were falling into the categories that journalists were in. It was a curious phenomenon when people with no media profile other than their blogs and occasional opinion pieces in various media outlets refusing to answer questions and comments and then making comments that suggested “who are you and why should I respond”? Human nature means that we get these repetitions of patterns, I am guessing.

In that respect, one of the more interesting phenomena on Twitter was this development of cliques and places that resembled more a school playground at lunch than a polite amphitheatre of ideas. Or, more accurately, an episode of The Inbetweeners where awkward teenagers find each other funny and don’t relate all that well with the outside world. And just like my own experience at school, when I found myself being ignored by various people, it wounded my ego and I asked why. I always tried very hard to respond to everyone who asked questions of me on Twitter, no matter who they were — and continue the conversation. I think it’s not only polite, it’s also meaningful and I have made a number of great friendships that way.

I found after a while that the secret of Twitter wasn’t your follower numbers that’s the thing to have — it’s the meaningful relationships you make. It’s the people with whom you make genuine connections that end up being the most important thing about Twitter. This is why I realised that on a rational level, I was developing strong, warm, lasting relationships with great people, I knew it was only a small number of people who were being rude. Rationality, however, is frequently absent when one is mixing socially and Twitter makes it harder because the others aren’t in the room with you. It is for this reason that I offer this advice at the end of this part of the story:

Expect your ego to get bruised frequently when engaging frequently on Twitter. Because it will be.

The final piece of advice is, however:

It is possible to be just some person, get a following, get your questions answered and have your voice heard.

Part 2 of my story is here… https://medium.com/@PrestonTowers/i-pseudonym-part-2-blogging-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-30c75d1aac26