
Synopsis:
Legacy can mean broad and lofty, but it can also mean personal. The latter is easier to download and keep with you as you roam.
Total Words
Reading Time in Minutes
3
Key Takeaways:
- Just one takeaway – just knowing good people are out there somewhere in the world, doing good things for the world, is legacy enough for me
About Mags Amond:
Who is Mags right now? A retired teacher. A PhD of Trinity College Dublin School of Education. A Treasurer of CESI, Computers in Education Society of Ireland. A Steering Committee Chair for OurKidsCode projest.
Contacting Mags Amond:
You can contact Mags via email

By Mags Amond
This blog post [with apologies and thanks to the B-52s] is my 2024 entry to CongRegation, the annual unconference held in Mayo Ireland each November. The cost of entry is thoughts translated into words on a theme. Each year as we leave, the theme for the following year is announced by convenor Eoin Kennedy. This year the theme is Legacy.
Thinking since last November about Legacy as a theme for Congregation 2024 has been daunting. Darn it, Eoin, I think – It is too broad, too lofty, for me. Too many meanings. Then something happens that makes me think about legacy at a more local level. A while ago I realised I’d have to leave the Twitter site (I’ll stick with that name, it is the version whose legacy I’ll speak of) which is increasingly tainted with toxicity . It isn’t what I signed up for any more, and today it is time to go.
‘I hear a wind
whistling air
whispering in my ear’
Walking away from Twitter is a very difficult thing to do – because of how important it has been to me for fifteen years. I signed up early 2009 after seeing how well it worked as a backchannel to TeachMeets, connecting those far far away with the people in the room (long long before the pandemic version of forced hybrid). A huge part of the Twitter legacy for me is the magic of its synbiotic evolution with TeachMeet ( yes, looking at you, @EwanMcIntosh !).
I loved the constraint of the early 280 sms-length tweets, though I hated the name. Very quickly it became a simple but potent way to learn, to discuss, to have the craic, to get the real news behind the news. The stickiness of a hashtag is the richest part of the legacy for me e.g. the runaway train of Monday night #EdChatIE conversations; how the #teachmeet, #CESIcon, #Turtlestitch, #CongRegation, and a myriad other timelines enabled chronicling of events although they were far far away. [On the darker side, I’m convinced that what tipped the outcome of the 2016 referendum next door was just that #Brexit was much much sexier than #Remain].
I have been roaming about in the fediverse, at mastodon social, for two years – it is very different but in a good way for me. It is quietish, and a bit clunky, but the mastodaoine are welcoming and I have learned and enjoyed a lot already. Most importantly, as was Twitter fadó fadó, it is open.
‘take it hip to hip, rock it through the wilderness’
The main thing that delayed my leaving Twitter behind until now was wondering how to keep contact with others of the diaspora, people I’ve come to respect and care for. But I reckon we’ll find each other when we need each other; I hope to see some of you in Cong next month. But even if we don’t meet again, just knowing you are out there somewhere in the world, doing good things for the world, is legacy enough for me today. I owe you all.
‘roam if you want to, roam around the world
roam if you want to, without wings without wheels
roam if you want to, roam around the world
roam if you want to, without anything but the love we feel’
ps – one thing I will miss seeing are my profile pictures. The banner is an array of glowie critters we made at a #MakerMeet in Thurles, the profile itself is picture of a gang of us in Dublin Castle on the day of days when our conference intersected with the #MarRef count in 2015, overlaid with branding of #CodeWeekEU. So I’ll just hang it here for now …
“Legacy of the Twitterverse” by Mags Amond is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Roam, “Cosmic Thing” (1989). B-52s. © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.
Writer(s): Frederick Schneider, Catherine Pierson, Cynthia Wilson, Julian Strickland, Robert Waldrop