Jacobs & McFarlane 2005; McCarthy & boyd 2005; Siemans 2009) and the Twitter-enabled backchannel in particular (O’Hear 2007; Jones 2008; Clay2009; Guy 2009; Jukes 2009; Kelly 2009; Reinhardt
2009; Schwartz2009). However, in the context of digital backchannel practices enteringthe mainstream as a result of the rapid uptake of Twitter and the ubiquityof portable and hand-held devices enabling its convenient use, it’s time torevisit the question of the conference backchannel and its contribution tocommunity learning.
The Twitter-enabled backchannel
Twitter is a web-based communications platform frequently described asenabling both blogging, although the term microblogging tends to beapplied, and some of the activities supported by social network sites likeFacebook including participation in various forms in online communities. Twitter posts, or, as they are more commonly known, ‘tweets’, are nolonger than 140 characters in length and, due to their brevity and thevarieties of language used, have much in common with the short text-making practices associated with SMS messages, instant messaging orFacebook status updates (Herring 2001). However, it is blog posts, albeitin a greatly truncated form, that tweets most resemble. Lankshear andKnobel have defined blogs as “hybrids of journal entries and annotationsor indices of links, or some mix of reflections, musings, anecdotes and thelike with embedded hyperlinks to related websites” (2006: 139) and thereis certainly much evidence to support the application of this definition to Twitter. The tweet below (fig. 1), taken from my own Twitter publictimeline, is an example of twittering as “classic journalling” with myself,the author “at the centre of the day-to-day matters being written about”(Lankshear & Knobel 2006: 150). Unlike what David Silver calls ‘thintweets’, or “posts that convey one layer of information”, my example is of a ‘thick tweet insofar as it “convey[s] two or more, often with help from ahyperlink” (Silver 2009). The hyperlink, in this case, is to a picture taken