Last night, I was the guest on an Autism Women's Network Tweetchat! It was about the upcoming Autism Speaks, I Want To Say flashblog, which is going to be THIS THURSDAY. That's March 28, 2013. There's a storify for the tweetchat here, if that's a thing that would help you. Or even if it wouldn't, it's still there.
I wound up participating as @FlashBlogAutist instead of as @yes_thattoo because of technical difficulties called "For some reason, @yes_thattoo's tweets didn't show up in the chatroom and that was fail." I guess it makes more sense to use @FlashBlogAutist, though, since this was about a flash blog. So it all works out in the end.
And people seemed to think that it was a cool idea, and people wanted to know things, and it was awesome. Also, Tweetchats just aren't that fast-paced compared to the classes I assist online two to four nights a week. Having maybe eight or so people tweeting, refreshing every five seconds at the fastest, just isn't that fast compared to forty or fifty students in a classroom answering questions, asking their own, and having occasional random chatter. In a Tweetchat, I'm allowed to not answer everything. In the classroom, my job description is basically "If a student has a question or gets an answer wrong, you answer, you figure out where they went wrong, and you explain so they get it." So the actual Tweetchat was pretty easy to manage. I had time to go find links and shorten them if I thought something was relevant, like, oh, three things that Amy Sequenzia wrote, two directly related to the AAC video by Autism Speaks and Hacking Autism that the flash blog is responding to, and I think one thing of mine and the post roll.
Basically, the tweet chat was win, I am excited, and I need to actually write my post for the flash blog, don't I? It would be kind of weird to be running a flash blog but not participating.
The other thing that happened on Sunday is that The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism let me know that they wanted to republish one of my pieces, What Reading Self-Advocate Blogs Does, which I'd published first on Autism NOW. And today it's up on the TPGA site too. I guess that might have been one of my better articles, though I have since had thoughts about the term self-advocate. It's true, but it's incomplete.
Oh, and here's the articles I linked to:
Amy Sequenzia: Autism Speaks, Time To Listen
Amy Sequenzia: Autism Speaks, I Want To Say: A Flash Blog
Autism Speaks, I Want To Say: Postroll! (I want that postroll to have much more on it by the end of March 28th.)
Amy Sequenzia: Not Good Enough, Autism Speaks
It was really great! I'm talking to our speech therapist this week about getting my kiddo in front of a keyboard. Thanks again!
ReplyDeleteMissed it, but read the storify - which is a great way to keep up. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteRegular tweetchats would be awesome... as long as I don't get harassed by people afterward who think they know my life better than I do. An "educator" who claims to work with parents of autistic children decided to harass me and trigger some serious stress, post-chat, and after repeatedly asking her to stop, she wouldn't. It was demeaning and disrespectful. Hopefully people who participate in the future can remember that not all of us are able to endlessly discuss/debate a topic and when someone asks that the conversation be ended, it needs to end.
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