The rights and responsibilities of live tweeting

This chat occurred May 19th/20th, 2013. The North American archived chat can be found here and the Australian archived chat can be found here.

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For many professionals, Twitter has long ago blown past posting what you ate for lunch and has become a major place for sharing ideas, information, and learning with online colleagues. This microblogging platform is a powerhouse of knowledge-sharing on a global scale. People share links to articles and resources and regularly discuss how they use tools and theoretical approaches in their practice as well as new research and trends in the field.

A natural evolution of this knowledge sharing became tweeting from conferences by attendees. This has happened in all professional domains – especially in industry, tech, and marketing circles, where live tweeting and backchannel discussions are encouraged and nearly everyone participates in this way.

In the realm of academia, however, there is sometimes a different perspective on live-tweeting conferences. Academics are emerging on Twitter and learning to use it to great succes, but they worry most about their ideas being stolen and their points being lessened due to the lack of detail available in 140 characters. A now famous debate emerged amongst several academics about the issues that have arisen surrounding live-tweeting at conferences. This led to an article by the Guardian with suggestions for live-tweeting conferences, and responses to this article.

Some months ago, the #slpeeps had their own sort of Twittergate – a discussion prompted by some live tweets that led to a full fledged debate about the ethics of live tweeting.  While it is easy enough to point people to the Guardian’s article on how to live tweet, or other people’s rules for how to live tweet well, and how to give presentations while people are tweeting, the question for SLPs arose again over whether or not live tweeting should occur at all and in what capacity.

We would like to re-open this discussion formally in #slpchat. We will be discussing live tweeting, the issues surrounding it, the rights of those who choose to do it and those whom they are tweeting about, but also the responsibilities of those same professionals.  We want an open and respectful discussion so that everyone can be aware of and consider multiple perspectives on the pros, cons, benefits, and concerns surrounding the issue.

SLPchat will be Sunday, May 19th at 2 pm EST (Toronto/New York) and again on Monday, May 20^th at 8 pm AEST (Sydney). We hope you’ll come and join the discussion!