Getting people to contribute information

My giant complaint about twitter is that it's mainly phatic. All of this talk of retweets, etc. is noise making. It gets me to look. It tells me who considers who important. Those are things to know, but they get me only so far.

I use social media a lot in my classroom teaching. I'm looking for people to contribute information which we then craft into knowledge. Some of that is phatic. Mostly though, it needs to be about substantive things students can do to effect tangible results.

Substance and results matter. If you can't produce those, your social connections won't matter.