Learning

Twitter: The great pretenders. @CherylKerl John Duffy, 53, ReadingDay job: Sells automatic doorsFollowers (on 1 November): 40,588I started a year ago.

I like the accent, and tweeting in Geordie amused me. In real life I sell automatic doors to the construction industry, but you can pretend to be anybody on the internet, and this proves it. At first, I'd gain 400 or 500 followers in every episode of The X Factor, then Greg James on Radio 1 got one of his Geordie production staff to voice the tweets every day for a month. Each time, I'd pick up 4,000 followers. My first tweet was something like, "Why aye, I'm on twitter. " Top tweets Seimon's pulled rank so wiv aall gorra take One Direction doon the pawk tuh gan on the swings an feed the ducks. Wei's the govamint gerrin rid a quangeaus? Aww, hazzen Nick Clegg done well faw himself? @chilean_miner AJ: The comedy came from 33 work colleagues trapped in the same room for four months, having to make small talk. "Can someone PLEASE let us know what's going on with Brangelina?? Twitter Increases Student Engagement [STUDY] Communicating in 140-character segments may seem to contradict the goals of generally long-winded academia, but a new study has found that the two are less opposed than one might think.

Students in the study who were asked to contribute to class discussions and complete assignments using Twitter increased their engagement over a semester more than twice as much as a control group. The study used a 19-question survey based on the National Survey of Student Engagement to measure student engagement at the beginning and end of a seminar course for first year students in pre-health professional programs.

Four sections (70 students) were given assignments and discussions that incorporated Twitter, such as tweeting about their experiences on a job shadow day or commenting on class readings. Three sections (55 students) did the same assignments and had access to the same information, but didn't use Twitter. Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook. Editor’s note: In this guest post, Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin argue why Twitter is undervalued.

Naval was an early investor in Twitter and owns Twitter shares; Adam does not. They have not discussed the content of this article with anyone inside Twitter. The views expressed are their own. They can be found on Twitter @naval and @ifindkarma. Twitter was valued at one billion dollars in its last round of financing, but we believe it may in fact be severely undervalued relative to Facebook because Twitter’s value proposition is less obvious. Facebook has utterly dominated the definition of the “social graph” to the point that conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley says that they have “already won social.” Twitter’s social interest graph is potentially a huge cash machine that will lift the company out of the red and into the black . . .

An interest graph differs from the “people you know in real life” social graph in that it is: 1) Twitter’s social graph is inherently interest-based.