From Dave Winer quoting Tom Simonite from New Scientist (via a twittering Budtheteacher):
Twitter is all about trivial examples. It's the stuff of no importance whatsoever that make us feel nice about being human.
Twittergrams, tweets, twitterbugs… they all have such a light, fluffy, almost confectionary tone about them. But is Twitter trivial? Is it the pet rock of 2007? Is feeling human unimportant? Hmmm…
The twitter craze razed through NECC2007 providing plenty of grist for educators to grind (almost as much as Second Life).
Being an educator who enjoys thought exercises, I found myself pondering the potential of Twitter in educational settings. I found that I was not alone in this regard and was happy to see a similar message from Barbara Ganley cross my twitterrific transom:
“Who else is playing around with Twitter in their classes? Ideas?”
After a brief email (read: old-school) exchange, I thought I would toss out a few ideas that we kicked around.
Writing/Microblogging/Reader Response
Barbara writes:
I like Twitter for its asynchronous, forced concision and can see my students this fall, in a course on writing in the 21st century, exploring collaborative writing (line by line, if you will--Twitter poetry, I suppose) as well as sharing and editing titles and concise thesis statements (for old-school academic writing).
I also want to explore students using tweets to send out questions and observations to the group while engaged in the "solo work" of the course--the reading and ruminating and writing that so often happens alone. How might sending links and notes this way deepen and broaden our learning experience together?Twitter’s 140-character limit provides a great framework for creating compact messages. Not that there’s anything wrong with being verbose; yet having taught writing, there’s much to be said for getting straight to the point. I’m not talking about using Twitter to write an equivalent of Joyce’s Ulysses, yet I think we’ve yet to really explore the potential of microblogging in formal and informal settings.
Imagine Twitter Haiku Jams, short story fests, writing workshops, or even six word lesson plans.
Collaboration/Project Management
At first I was using Twitter as a way to see what my favorite online personalities were up to. At the NECC conference, we used it as a way to organize, give quick updates, and rapidly point to resources (urls, etc). While in several cases, a mobile phone number would have made life a bit less complicated, the potential send links and pertinent info to a large scope of people is intriguing.
I can see using Twitter as a means for students to do the same: to organize ideas, reflect, send notes, and manage meet-ups.
Again, this is not to say these tasks cannot be done with existing tools/web resources, yet indulge me: I’m still in brainstorming mode.
A solution in search of a problem?
Perhaps Twitter will remain trivial, a minor celebrity enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame. But like most things, I believe it involves what you make it.
Finally, here’s a few resources I culled that might be useful to kickstart our collective thinking about using Twitter. I’ll eventually port them over to a wiki page. Until then, let me know your thoughts.
Resources:
Six ways to improve Twitter -- Article with several good resources
Twitter Wiki –- a nice collection of resources
Twittown -- Unofficial Twitter Community -- lots o' updates and third party apps.
Twitterfeed -- Feeds an update on one's blog to your twitter account
Twittergram -- Add audio to Twitter
Twitterment -- Find out what people are twittering about. (Social research tool!)
EgorCast – A Jott, Twitter, Jaiku Mashup
Twitter Mash-Up -- Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku mashup
Newbie Guide – Good for introducing Twitter and getting started
Twitterrific -- Desktop updating (Tweets) for Macs
Twitteroo -- Desktop updating for PC users
Twadget -- Twitter for Windows Vista folk
Twitter Badges -- Blog feeding goodness
Keywords: Barbara Ganley, budtheteacher, buzz, convergence, craze, Dave Winer, educational technology, fads, hotlinking, learning, mash-ups, NECC2007, new media, organization, pet rock, Second Life, teaching, twitter, writing
Comments
(got here via your tweet)
Dear Chris,
Clearly the more we use Twitter, the clearer it becomes. I wanted to share with you my ideas about this. I posted them before trying the tool.
http://eltnotes.blogspot.com/2007/04/this-twittering-life.html
For the time being, I still think why I would ask my students to have another account in another service. What is it that we can do with twitter better than with any other IM service?
I am very happy with Twitter myself; the proximity it creates to people and events like EdubloggerCon. But I am connecting to people I would not have met otherwise. My students are already connected.
Glad to find this post and see your views. We keep on reflecting. Thank you.
(I'm fceblog on Twitter)
I agree with Claudia -- the more we use it, the clearer it becomes.
All of the Twitter talk at NECC got this guy (who wasn't even in Atlanta) to try it out...and now I'm hooked.
Since I'm headed back to teach this fall for the first time in 3 years, I, too, and wondering how "micro-blogging" (a la Twitter) can have a positive impact on the kids/programs.
Thanks for the great resources/thinking, Chris!
Cheers, Christian
http://thinklab.typepad.com/
I wonder what the use of Twitter would look like in a 1:1 environment...could it's use be applied productively or would it become a classroom management nightmare, with it eventually being blocked. All the more reason for the discussion.
Thanks.
Great post Chris! More to think about.
Good to meet you and chat at NECC.
Looking forward to learing from you even more this year.
Twitter, or other micro-blogging options, linked to a course/class Motherblog can offer our students opportunities to discuss different kinds of asynchronous online discourse, considering voice, purpose, audience. They can practice conciseness and experience for themselves what Thoreau was getting at when he said something along the lines of, "It take a long time to make a story short" while building community through the fun of leaving interwoven trails of thinking pertaining to the class. I could see, for example, high school students leaving phone-tweets as they come across real-world examples of what they are studying in class or as they conduct fieldwork.
If my students get even a half of the valuable links, pointers, and well, fabulous one-liners I do every day in Twitterific, I'll consider it a success. Thanks, Chris, for pulling this conversation over to your blog from Twitter and email. This is just the kind of evolving conversation I can see taking off from student Tweets.
~Barbara
Another Twitter perspective from Mamamusings (twittered by John Pederson!)
David J --
In the end, I'd rather have kids twitter than iChat because at least it's an interesting hybrid of public/private, although at least iChat only disturbs the iChatters. (Can you imagine a classroom where everyone has twitterific installed? Yee gods!)
I can see it paying huge dividends if Twitter were to start to define groups and such. It'd be great to have kids working collaborative -- across schools, countries, etc... -- and use twitter to facilitate the conversation and such.
But right now, I'm also just happy playing with it, too.
Very cool ideas, Chris and friends! I guess we were all thinking "what can we do with this" as we played around during sessions.
I was thinking this could replace CPS systems (never really liked those) as a tool for assessing opinion, examining consensus, looking for outlying ideas.
Imagine being able to see learners' questions and ideas during a controversial film or a debate, or after reading a thoughtful essay.
Imagine collecting twitters during a debate to pose to the debaters.
I like the idea of learners limited words to kernels and being able to respond easily to the kernels of others.
And then imagine watching that film or hearing that debate across geographic boundaries. Imagine twittering with all sorts of "accents." It could create far richer experiences.