Keeping up-to-date with TESSA online

Michèle Deane and Rhiannon Moore, The Open University, United Kingdom

Twitter

Twitter is an online tool that allows people to keep in touch through very short messages. These short messages are called ‘tweets’. TESSA uses Twitter to ‘tweet’ news of what is happening in the TESSA world. It is very easy to join Twitter (see below), or you can read the TESSA tweets without joining Twitter. Just type these website addresses into your internet browser: http://twitter.com/tessafrica for the English ‘tweets’ or http://twitter.com/tessaenfrancais for the French equivalent.

                      French Twitter TESSA Screen                                                                               English Twitter TESSA Screen

You can search for other people or organisations using the search box at the top of the Twitter home page. If you want to tweet, you need to first register with Twitter - you could set up an account for yourself, or for your institution. Once you have done this, you are ready to begin ‘tweeting’ and you can keep up to date with other organisations by choosing to ‘follow’ them.

If you would prefer us to tweet your TESSA news for you, send your messages to FELS-TESSA@open.ac.uk and you will see them on Twitter. Remember, tweets can only be 140 characters long, including the spaces!

Facebook

Facebook is another kind of online networking tool which people can use to keep in touch with friends, colleagues and organisations they are interested in. TESSA has a Facebook page which you can see without registering with Facebook by typing http://www.facebook.com/tessafrica into your internet browser. The TESSA Facebook page contains information about TESSA to allow people who are interested to find out more.

TESSA Facebook Page

If you’d like to use Facebook, you’ll need to register for a personal account. Once you have set up your own Facebook account, you can then set up other information pages for your institution or for TESSA in your country. Your personal account is called your ‘profile’ on Facebook, and the other pages set up for projects like TESSA are called ‘pages’.

If you join Facebook, you can keep up to date with organisations like TESSA you are interested in by choosing to ‘like’ them. This means that updates these organisations post will appear on your Facebook homepage when you are logged in. You can also write questions or comments to the organisations by typing on their ‘page’.

Internet Security

When you register for a social networking website like Facebook or Twitter, you need to make sure you read all the questions they ask very carefully. Sometimes the site may ask if they can have access to your email contact list – if you’re not happy with this, you can choose not to let them.

Let us know what you think!

Do you use Facebook or Twitter? Do they help you keep up to date with what other organisations and colleagues are doing? Or are there other, more popular social networking sites which people use in your country? Let us know how you use these types of websites so we can understand the best ways to keep people up to date with what TESSA is doing.

You can post your responses in the Comments box below.