An Iste Bytsie Post... With Some Big Tweet Conference Data

In the 3 years that I have been on Twitter I have never seen anything as manic as last weeks #iste13 - The hashtag for the International Society for Technology in Education annual conference.

20,000 connected technology loving educators talked (and talked!) about technology in education... for 3 days solid! This produced over 40,000 Tweets.

Twitter seemed to be such a key part of the conference, so much so that it created an "unconference" hashtag #notatiste.  The crazy thing was that even this was a trending for a lot of the event! Only educators could have an "I'm not at the conference" hashtag trend?!

While there was a lot of envy from those not at the conference, the Twitterati did a great job at keeping everyone informed of the goings ons... and some even found ways to make their own fun - Tips for surviving Iste if you're not there... Love the latte prank!

Another aspect of the conference seemed to be that each slide of Adam Bellow's closing keynote presentation "You are invited to change the world" seemed to be Twitter friendly. This is something that I am noticing more often. I don't know if this was intentional but Scott Stratten from Unmarketing does actually structure his presentations to fit into 140 Tweetable characters. 

I would say that I am taking a cue from these presenters and making this one of my shortest posts ever... But the truth is, once you know the reason for the post, you will skip any text and go straight to the data... but before you do I have a suggestion.

The #iste Twitter challenge - "Unconnected" Educators
Send this post or the files below to any colleagues who are not on Twitter or any other Social Media channels and ask them to spend 5 minutes looking at the Tweets and challenge them NOT to learn something new and interesting.

While connected educators and Twitter are both great... Putting the 2 together in large numbers is a nightmare! The Tweets were just coming too quick and fast!

Connected Educators - Straw Poll

Now for a quick straw poll for all the connected educators who made all this noise and generated all this #iste13 content... Hands up if; 

• Your Twitter account is now bulging with Tweets and links that are marked as faviourites for you to check out? How many of these faviourites have you checked since the event?
• You felt that the Twitter stream was too frantic!While you saw lots of great suggestions and resources.... you know that you missed lots of great tips, links and discussions?
• You are likely to have the time to go through the #iste13 archives? 

I found myself giving the wrong answer to these questions so I thought I would download all the conference Tweets in a way that would allow me to look for key words quickly, as well as to organise any data or discussions that would allow me to identify some trends.

Therefore I have collated as many iste related tweets as possible and imported them onto some excel spreadsheets, these can be found on the following links:

Conference Tweets - 25 & 26 June
Conference Tweets - 23 & 24 June 
Post Conference Tweets
Not At Iste
All Iste13 Tweeters 

For people in the UK who follow my blog I have done the same for the recent  #Educationfest Conference:

Educationfest Tweets

I will be adding this to the data I have gathered from other #edchat sessions as I continue the search for some "slow hunch" eureka edu ideas... More details on this to follow 

In the mean time I hope you find this data set useful and that it helps to ensure that you don't miss any of the great EdTech resources that were discussed.

If this is the first time visiting my blog please feel free to check out some of the other posts or some of my other reports, which can be found here.

Iste delegates and followers may be particularly interested in Tech Story - What Education can Learn from Pixars Toy Story.