To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

I’m embarrassed to confess that now in my 16th year of publishing pelinks4u, I’ve managed to avoid, actually intentionally avoided, almost any participation in social media. In 1999 and a much younger person, I was on the cutting edge of online technology. Facebook’s billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg was only 15 and probably a high school freshman. The Internet was in its infancy, still difficult to use, and its value unclear. A few years earlier, George Graham and his doctoral students at Virginia Tech conceived of a way to use the Web to promote physical education and in 1996 PE Central was launched.

Not long afterwards, I found myself on sabbatical planning one project but then being distracted and intrigued by the potential of the Internet. I saw it first as a way to link my college students with information they could use to improve their teaching skills. This idea then morphed into a newsletter sharing links, news, and opinions. Remarkably – at least in reflection – pelinks4u began as a weekly publication and continued that way until sanity set in and I switched to biweekly. Even more remarkably, it took a couple of years until the present monthly publication schedule began.

When pelinks4u started I did all of the information gathering and HTML coding myself. Fortunately, through the support of several generous site sponsors – many of which continue to support pelinks4u today (thank you) – I was able to get some assistance. Teaching colleagues volunteered to write teaching tips (also many thanks). But most notably Terri Covey began as the pelinks4u Webmaster while still a student. She’s continued to do it for many years now as a Central Washington University employee. Terri probably knows more about pelinks4u than me. Any credit I’ve received for pelinks4u actually belongs mostly to Terri’s truly outstanding dedication to the publication.

But of course times are changing and, as I’ve often warned in regard to the PE profession, nothing lasts unchanged forever. I want to publicly express a huge THANK YOU to Terri as her job moves her on to other challenges. Over the next few months, pelinks4u will be redesigned as we try to better meet the needs of current readers and those we’d like to attract. There’s more than a quarter million of us out there just in the USA, and we’re going to need to better connect to preserve public school physical education in the future.

Which brings me back to the title of this editorial. Clearly, social media isn’t going away. It’s not necessarily an age thing, although I’m guessing that our younger teaching colleagues – many of whom grew up only knowing an Internet connected world – embrace the use of social media as a way of life. And while social media may not be so “essential” to those of us who would still much rather curl up clutching “real” books and magazines, clearly we’re a minority and we’d better get over it or risk getting left behind.

And so, after reading Lynn Hefele‘s social media article appearing in this month’s pelinks4u, I decided it was time I made the jump. Not Facebook. Not yet. That still looks like too much work for me to keep going. But Twitter looks doable. I already have an account. I live on an island and “tweets” inform me when the ferry is down – sadly a far too frequent event. But I’d never tweeted, didn’t know how, and was unaware there was a flourishing online Twitter world of physical education.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve tweeted a bit and learned that there’s some interesting stuff (as well as the other) constantly streaming out to us 140 characters at a time. If you haven’t tried it, I encourage you to be bold and give it a go. It’s not hard. In addition to Lynn’s article there are lots of online tutorials. Incidentally, my Twitter username is #pelinks4u – Join me. I’m still a rookie but I’m determined to better understand how this social media stuff can help us.