Serendipity35

Tweetchats are live synchronous conversations that happen on Twitter. People gather around a designated hashtag and anyone who wants to participate just searches for the hashtag and then uses it in their tweets.

These thing pop up organically at events. Most conferences create an "official" hashtag and ask people to use it it during the conference. A variation on planned conversations are the chats that emerge around events like elections, the Academy Awards, the President's State of the Union address etc.

Of course, you can follow a hashtag at any time. Looking at the tag #MOOC will show you the current conversation on Massive Open Online Courses, but a tweetchat is when a designated time is planned to chat. (See an example below) Tweetchats usually have a moderator(s) who will ask questions and guide the conversation.

Some hashtags have been used for several years. For example, if you search in twitter for the hashtag #lrnchat, you will find tweets about instructional design, training, and eLearning.

You don't need to have an account in twitter in order to follow a hashtag, but then you are only an observer witn read but no write privileges. That would be very Web 1.0  :-(    One general education hashtag is #edchat and going to https://twitter.com/search?q=%23edchat&src=typd will show you what tweets people are tagging as #edchat currently whether or not you belong to twitter. Two other tags used are #blogchat (about blogging) and #futrchat for futurists.

What inspired me to post this today is that I am participating in an online social media course and we are doing a tweetchat tonight from 8pm-10pm US EST (Need to convert that time?)  Again, tweetchats are "open" because anyone can follow a conversation and participate, so if you want to to follow us or join in, go ahead.

There are also web apps to help filter these conversations from the rest of the flood of tweets in your feed. Tweet Chat and Twitter's own native app, TweetDeck, are two popular ones.