As part of the obligatory year-end reflections, I have noticed that despite consistent good intentions, I haven’t been posting here regularly this fall. As always, I hope to remedy that as I don’t imagine ever entirely abandoning Screenshot.
However, in my absence from this space, I have been somewhat more active in another corner of the internet. After some false starts and a general sense of apathy about the service, I have found a use for Twitter that seems to be working for me, mostly as a replacement for Delicious which I found became cumbersome at some point a few years ago (at least for the ways I was using it).
So, tweeting under @ProfAMH, I’ve been linking to stories I want to keep track of but don’t have full weblog posts about. Most of the time, this means they’re stories I want to be able to pull up again for use in a class I’m going to teach, which means most of my tweets are labeled with hashtags like #cis105 (for my games course), #cis335 (for my security course), and so on. At my most optimistic I hope this might be interesting for students (or even alumni) and more appealing than following my very-sporadically-updated weblog. I’ve also started collecting some links under an #InterdisciplinaryCS tag as I’ve found myself involved in more projects related to interdisciplinary computing, CS in the liberal arts, and related topics over the past year.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever get on board with the social interaction aspect of Twitter, but for now this is helping me keep track of content and if others find it interesting or helpful that’s just bonus. My goal for the coming year is to make consistent use of it while phasing back into the habit of posting here as well.
And so into the new year we go, with the best of intentions for positive habits of social media usage!