Maggie Tsai's List: Twitter Education

• Most would agree that Twitter was one of the social networking phenomena of 2008, and has enjoyed exponential growth in popularity. The microblogging tool has obvious potential to be used in formal learning, both in traditional online classroom settings and - through mobile technologies - for mobile learners.

  • Teaching with Twitter
• • ways to use Twitter
• 1. ‘Twit Board’ Notify students of changes to course content, schedules, venues or other important information.
  
• • the first step
• 2. ‘Summing Up’ Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.
• • the first step
• 3. ‘Twit Links’ Share a hyperlink – a directed task for students – each is required to regularly share one new hyperlink to a useful site they have found.

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• It’s been almost 8 months since I published the post, “6 Examples of Using Twitter in the Classroom”, about uses of the popular micro-blogging tool in the instructional setting. This post generated a lot of traffic, and continues to attract hundreds of viewers every week.

   

  
• Since that brief posting, I’ve come across a lot of articles containing examples and suggestions for using Twitter in instructional applications. 

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  I must admit that when I first heard about Twitter I thought it represented the apex of what concerns me about internet technology: solipsism and sound-bite communication. While I obviously spend a great deal of time online and thinking about the potential of these new networked digital communication structures, I also worry about the way that they too easily lead to increasingly short space and time for conversation, cutting off nuance and conversation, and what is often worse how these conversations often reduce to self-centered statements

  • Ways to use Twitter in Academia