Twitter Expert Connect Part 3

 

Twitter Connect Assignment Reflection

For my  Twitter Expect Connect Assignment, I chose to inquire experts around the world about the many uses of nanotechnology. I followed and connected with the following people:

-Phillip Mote (@pwmote)

-Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob)

-Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateofGavin)

-Nigel Golden (@scienceizgolden)

-Petra Pearce (@petra_pearce)

-Phillip Cook (@cookp)

-Christopher Becke (@BeckePhysics)

-Andrew Jones (@AboutPhysics)

-Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins)

-Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

-Angela Meyer (@AngelameyerPhD)

-Tom Grissom (@tomgrissom)

-ACS Green Chemistry (@ACSGCl)

All of these people are Chemistry/Physics/Climate/Space experts, all potential fields of interest for me, as well as the subject of my Genius Hour assignment. I thought nanotechnology could apply to all of those fields because of knowledge I had acquired with articles. Consequently, I asked them how technology could be used in their respective fields. For example, a common type of question asked was how nanotechnology could be used to help the issue of global warming or what were its uses in the domain of space exploration. All of my questions were based on the same format, which was:

  1. A form of salutation, for politeness
  2. A reference to something about their professional life or their tweets, to make it seem as though I wasn’t just asking them a question just because I wanted an answer, but because what interested them was genuinely something that interested me. This, I believe, increased my chances of getting an answer from them.
  3. An invitation for them personally to answer the question (e.g I’d like to hear your input; I’d like to know what you think)

The information collected from all of those answers would, I believe, help me acquire the information I needed for my Genius Hour project, especially since the information was so rare about this topic.

After sending tweets to all of the experts listed above, I received very limited results, in fact, I only received 1 response from one of the professors I reached out to:

Even though the responses weren’t numerous, and none of my experts followed me back, or offered further assistance, or even acknowledge my existence beyond that one tweet, the one answer I got was of quality, I would say, because it opened a whole different array of things to expand my question. Thanks to that tweet, I was able to research more the topic that was the Decadal Survey, which was a key point in learning the importance of nanotechnology in space exploration and solving the problem of climate change.

In retrospect, I now understand how these skills can be of use outside of a class environment: with just one tweet, I got more potential to expand my question than anything I searched before reaching out to the experts. If I polish this skill, I would be able to get additional information on any topic that isn’t very present on the internet, and of better quality than I could ever have researched myself.

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