For my Genius Hour Project I decided to do a sort of grant project about Senegal’s environment, more precisely on it’s beaches, and poverty.
http://planetsave.com/2015/08/11/a-jihad-against-pollution-in-senegal/
As a class we had to go on twitter and find 10 Professors, Authors, Experts, or Thought Leaders in our chosen field and follow them.
The people I followed and why:
All these people where either environmentalists or worked in poverty.
After a few days and weeks of seeing what kinds of tweets they posted, and after creating a friendly yet professional relationship, we were ready for our request. We had to send each expert a personal tweet, depending on the person and what you wanted to ask them. You could ask them:
- A request for some specific information that you want to know for your research.
- Advice, impute, or opinion
I myself asked for websites that could give me information on my subject. This would help me for my Genius Hour project because I would have professional input on the sites that I use.
This task was very difficult because we had to make sure to introduce ourselves, say why we where writing, and what we wanted to know in only one tweet (49 characters). For me this was the most challenging part, but after the first few, I started to get the hand of it, and the rest came quicker and better.
After that we had to wait for the experts to reply to our requests. I had three responses, one from , one from , and one from . These three people gave me the links to the websites that they thought would help me. Apart from answering to my requests they also followed me back. Like I was already following them, every time I check Twitter I can see the different things they post, and some of those things can sometimes be helpful.
Overall, I think that this was a difficult task to to because, first of all you have to find the people and make sure they are “for real”. Then you have to get to know them online, and form an electronic relationship. This is very difficult because it makes you feel uncomfortable, talking to a stranger. Then you had to send them a request in a short about of words without being to broad, and making sure you have everything. However when they do answer you can get some very good responses that might really help you on a project.
I might use this process for other school project where input from experts around the world might not be a bad idea. I look forward to trying this again, but next time I hope that it will be on something that might be more fun to learn about.
