juan valdes via Compfight
For the Twitter Expert part 1 and 2 I did several things. Firstly I followed ten people on Twitter who I thought were experts in my Genius Hour Project which was rock climbing and high altitude rock climbing. I followed @thestonemind @WriterGrrrl @udini @sashadigiulian @tfsohn @katesiber @JonGugala @Earth_ist @HalSF @stephanieapears. These people are authors, freelance writers, journalists and they work for well known magazines. All seemed to be very experienced rock climbers.
After I followed them I asked them questions about rock climbing. I asked them all sorts of things such as what the most dangerous mountain they climbed was, if there is something they always made sure to bring with them that wasn’t anything obvious like ropes, helmets and water bottles. I asked them where the most remote place they’ve climbed was and what the longest time they have climbed a single mountain was. I asked them these type of questions because I wanted to learn something that I couldn’t just search up on the internet, I wanted to learn something about their personal experience that was unique. I thought that that would have been more interesting to add in my presentation.
After two to three days I started getting a few responses but the the responses weren’t what I was looking for. A few of the people I followed liked the question I asked them but they did not respond to it. Mr Leinbach gave me a bit of hope by telling me that sometimes people like a tweet so that they don’t forget to respond to it which gave me some well needed confidence. I checked Twitter a few days later, and he was right! They had responded. It still wasn’t what I was looking for but at least it was something. About three people responded and they said things like “Hi Nicholas haven’t done a lot of long climbs. Ha’Ling Peak in Canmore was fun (app 2400m elevation gain).”
What I realized was that many people I tweeted weren’t active climbers anymore. Since they weren’t active climbers anymore I didn’t think there was a need to continue the conversation. I will us what I learnt in school when I need credible sources because there are many well educated people on Twitter. Overall, Twitter Expert taught me that real experts are a lot easier to access than I thought and with enough persistence you will be able to learn anything.