Although, according to Gartner's Hype Cycle, Twitter is about to enter the "Trough of Disillusionment", many educators are still trying to come to grips with it, and in particular its use in the classroom.  Here are 10 resources that specifically look at the educational use of Twitter:

Also check out http://janeknight.typepad.com/socialmedia/2009/08/the-gartner-hype-cycle-2009.html

It seems like only yesterday (okay last year) when we were rambling on about how Google Apps and all of these Web 2.0 companies were going to take our data and flush it down the toilet once they ran out of money. (And for that matter, remember when Discovery Streaming was the next thing to buttered toast?)

Well, what a difference one summer can make.

Yesterday I needed to print out a copy of the English flag for my daughter. Rather than going through books looking for a Black Line Master copy I decided it would probably be relatively easy to find one online. However this made for a much more difficult task than first imagined. Trying to find the outline of the flag just wasn’t happening. I needed one that she could colour in. Finding one that was already filled in was easy. So I decided that perhaps I could do something in Photoshop. Again, another dead end. Though possible, I didn’t want to read through pages of instructions and hope for an outcome. So, enter stage left; Picnik.

Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble.

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.

High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.

But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.

Twitter has evolved into a great resource for news and current events. Luckily, it’s also a great resource for other important information, such as awesome teaching advice. Whether you are still earning your teaching certification or are just starting out as a teacher, these Twitter feeds offer resources you shouldn’t miss. In these feeds you’ll find advice for the classroom, advice for early childhood education, technology, special education, or advice from others such as consultants or administrators, and much more.

It was with a deep breath and a sigh that I read several articles about the latest poll from Common Sense Media asserting there is a gap between what parents think their kids are doing on social networking sites and what they're actually doing.

This really neat post looks at some recent figures about what students are doing online by inverting the figures to see what the majority are really doing. Definitely worth a look at once you have seen the figures in the media.

As Twitter's popularity grows, it has forced many organizations to set guidelines for what types of information their employees can share on the service. But in trying to construct a policy, many companies grapple with how to balance the transparency social networking tools enable with the need to safeguard company information.

Twitter, like most social networks, blurs the line between workers' personal and professional lives. On one hand, a Twitter account could reflect someone's life with family and friends. On the other hand, it could communicate experiences at work — or, more likely, it conveys a bit of both. Some people try to manage multiple accounts, but few have the time. Plus, if people change companies, multiple accounts are bad for continuity and maintaining followers.

Via the Victorian eGovernment Resource Centre comes this US guide.

A colleague a few months ago asked, “so how do I know when you have send out a message on Twitter”?

Good question – especially if you are new to Twitter.

It’s  interesting to watch ‘newbies’ develop their own online etiquette and management of their Twitter use.  Lots of options, but there are a few key tips that we could all keep in mind as we ‘tweet’ away.

This really great post from Judy O'Connell looks at how to begin using Twitter from an education point of view.

Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites are inceasingly being targeted by cyber-criminals drawn to the wealth of personal information supplied by users, experts warn.

Data posted on the sites -- name, date of birth, address, job details, email and phone numbers -- is a windfall for hackers, participants at Campus Party, one of the world's biggest gatherings of Internet enthusiasts, said.

A vicious virus Koobface -- "koob" being "book" in reverse -- has affected thousands Facebook and Twitter users since August 2008, said Asier Martinez, a security specialist at global IT solutions provider Panda Security.

"Its spread has been very significant and it has been detected in 4,000 different variants," he told AFP at the week-long event which wraps up Sunday in Valencia in eastern Spain.

The virus hijacks the accounts of social networking site users and sends messages steering friends to hostile sites coontaining malware, a malicious software often designed to infiltrate a computer system for illicit purposes.

From The Age newspaper this article highlights again the need to e vigilant about how much identity we share in the one space.

Of all the tools to emerge from the Web 2.0 revolution, few are as intriguing as Twitter. When Twitter first appeared in 2006 it was one of those hard to define web tools that, on the surface, sounded silly and trivial. However, in the last few years it has risen to be one of the web’s most powerful simple ideas.

This blog post is a reprint of a great article written by Chris Betcher looking at how Twitter can be a powerful tool in developing a Personal Learning Network.