My week as guest curator of @femedtech

This week I’ve been volunteering as a guest curator of @femedtech. I actively work to promote equality in everything I do, so when the opportunity came up to support this growing network as a Twitter curator, I took the opportunity to help out gladly – but I wasn’t really sure what it would be like, taking over the voice of this kind of account. So one week in and with one more week to go, here is my personal reflection on how it’s going.

Fortunately I had guidance, encouragement and advice from Frances Bell and Helen Beetham from the outset and they shared their experience and advice generously. I liked their suggestion to add my own identity to the account, which I did, and then I started tweeting and re-tweeting and following and.. a few days in everything started to feel a bit easier.

I also set up a TAGS Twitter archive and TAGSExplorer for the #femedtech hashtag, to help chart and visualise the conversation as it evolves:

As you can see, it’s still a fairly small conversation, but it is starting to grow and I found it really interesting to be able to see what is going on.

Another approach I tried was to find and follow accounts with similar values or related ideas, such as @uncommon_women and the @feministintrnet for example and to welcome new followers or volunteers as they arrived. Hello to you all!

With another week ahead, I hope I’ll get a chance to generate a bit more of a conversation and prompt more contributions (tagged as #femedtech) and have the chance to contribute to the development of information for future guest curators with Helen and Frances. My long term hope is that we can help draw together some of the existing initiatives, amplify the voices of those actively working to promote feminism and equality in Learning Technology and connect more people with each other. There are certainly enough challenges out there to be tackled, so let’s hope that we can help connect the dots to make a stronger movement.

Note: this post was updated with a better TAGSExplorer view and links (thanks to @mhawksey)