Scanning Social Media

Facebook, Google Alerts, Twitter, blogs, and other social media activity: To “track the pulse” of activity in education policy, one American grantmaker regularly follows a select group of blogs and Twitter feeds, “not just by policy wonks but by teachers and others whose opinions I respect, on both sides of many arguments, although they can be very ideological sometimes.” He has become an active tweeter himself....he soon realized that Twitter could be “an important tool for gathering information and intelligence that in the past was almost impossible to get. It’s like a ticker system that just streams to my desktop. Some of it is good, and some of it is awful, but for the most part, it’s pretty useful.”