On Monday, December 12, I'll be doing a session of Swedish Twitter University.

#STU06 - Jamais Cascio:
“The Foresight Immune System”

If accurate predictions are impossible — and they are — why should we think about the future? In 25 tweets we’ll explore why foresight work remains important and what role it should play in our thinking about the world. Hint: it does for civilization what a vaccination does for our bodies…

The concept is that I will prepare 25 tweets, each an individual thought (so not broken up over multiple entries), on my topic. There's an associated hashtag (in my case, it will be #STU06), and in between posts I'll be answering questions that come up from those following the "class."

It's actually a cool idea, one that takes advantage of the Twitter format in a way that isn't simply trying to reproduce another medium. It pushes the "instructor" to be pithy and concise, and to pare concepts down to their basics.

Previous Swedish Twitter University classes include Rachel Armstrong's "Beyond Sustainability," Natalio Kasnogor's "To Boldly Go: Computer Science's Quest to Make Living Matter Algorithms-Friendly," and Jonas Hannestad's "Nature As Technology: Strategies for Nano-Scale, DNA-Based Communication." Pretty heady stuff.

The class starts at 8pm GMT/12 noon PST (my time). Here's the key info:

How can I attend an event?
You just open http://twitter.com/SvTwuni in your browser to follow the presentation. Then go to the http://twitter.com homepage in another browser window, and perform a Twitter-search for the associated hashtag (for example #STU01). Arrange the browser windows next to each other for maximum overview of the event. Everything will be updated in more or less realtime.

Or you can put the @SvTwuni-flow in one column and the associated hashtag-flow in another one next to it, if you got a Twitter-client like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.

Do I need a Twitter-account to attend an event?

No, not if you just want to lurk and not engage in any discussions… But that’s NOT recommended!