engage
Tweets in Indonesia
Reaching people with social media
Quality
Hugely popular social media service, Twitter, is a microblogging tool that lets people broadcast their message to a big audience, and allows people to tune in to the messages they find interesting.
People can send and read text messages of up to 140 characters, called “tweets”. These can be private (viewable only to selected people approved by the user) or public (available for the whole world to see on the Twitter website). The people who subscribe to a person's tweets are that person's “followers”, and the person can also “follow” others to receive their messages. If followers register for Twitter, they can also join in the conversation, posting tweets through the website interface, SMS, or via a range of apps for mobile devices.
Relevance
Twitter is a low-budget way to maintain ongoing contact with participants, over a wide geographical spread, and even without an internet connection (via SMS subscription). This feature can be used for mobile learning, to set up a low-cost SMS system that facilitates two-way communication between a trainer and learners (for instructions see the My.COOP mobile learning toolkit in the links section).
Tweets can be used to prepare participants before courses, as part of a training program, or to conduct follow-up broadcasts and maintain contact once courses are completed.
Tweets can be used to prepare participants before courses, as part of a training program, or to conduct follow-up broadcasts and maintain contact once courses are completed.
Impact
In 2012 the Centre conducted two workshops on local economy recovery and conflict resolution for village facilitators in the Maluku province in Indonesia. These islands are quite big and the villages are not well connected in the region. The only well established connections between participants were affordable BlackBerry phones that almost everybody had access to.
Jointly with the local ILO representative we set up a Twitter account that all participants could connect to through their mobile phone. This only involved sending out two local messages in order to establish the connection. Once the workshop was finished and all participants finished their action plans, the project coordinator used the Twitter account to send out regular messages with reminders of the milestones of the project and some additional news flashes of what was going on in the different villages. This simple low-budget idea fostered connection right after the workshops were finished.
Jointly with the local ILO representative we set up a Twitter account that all participants could connect to through their mobile phone. This only involved sending out two local messages in order to establish the connection. Once the workshop was finished and all participants finished their action plans, the project coordinator used the Twitter account to send out regular messages with reminders of the milestones of the project and some additional news flashes of what was going on in the different villages. This simple low-budget idea fostered connection right after the workshops were finished.