Teaching With Twitter: Not for the Faint of Heart - Technology - By Jeffrey R. Young West Lafayette, Ind. Maybe Sugato Chakravarty should wear a helmet to class. The professor of consumer sciences and retailing at Purdue University repeatedly attempts the instructional equivalent of jumping a motorcycle over a row of flaming barrels. OK, asking 250 students to post questions on Twitter during a class doesn't risk life or limb. He has given them the power to do just that. A constant stream of comments, often tangential, accompanies his talks.
The moment is telling. The unanswered question, though, is whether that theory can work in practice, in a room packed primar ily with 18- to 22-year-olds who can seem more interested in high grades than in high-mindedness. That uncertainty actually excites Mr. Many colleagues are watching such experiments with a mix of curiosity and disbelief to see how the professors land. Students seem to love the chance to make their voices heard in class without having to actually speak. Emboldened Students I asked Mr. Monica A. Teaching with Twitter. Twitter Tweets for Higher Education. I love Twitter.com. I usually post a couple of items a day, on average, and tend to follow and interact others who also post in a moderate fashion. Some people post dozens of twits a day and use Twitter as a kind of instant messaging client. I see, and use it, more as a mini-blog. When I click on my name, I see all my posts, which is a sort of summary of things that I do and think about that I want to share with others.
For the uninitiated, Twitter limits you to 140 characters and spaces per post (or per "tweet"). I actually had not considered it as a tool for education until I saw a link posted by Twittown to a blog post on that subject. 1- Using Twitter with your students on Doug Belshaw's teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk blog - emphasizes secondary education. I think Twitter could be ideal for reminding students about homework, trips and such things, especially as they can enter their mobile phone number to be alerted when one of their ‘friends’ updates their account.
Classroom2.0: Twitter, del.icio.us and participatory learning. I do not use a textbook. It is not that I dislike textbooks. It is that my textbook is the web. My textbook is YOU and ME and NOW. Instead of a book, I add all relevant readings, videos or examples to my course delicious bookmarks. That’s my virtual, live, textbook – licensed under Creative Commons. Right now v. back then As I explained to my class, the most important stuff to know about the web is what’s happening RIGHT NOW. For example, this past week, we watched Howard Rheingold’s most recent Vlog post about social bookmarking in which Howard explains stuff I have been talking about (but with more pizazz). Twitter for teaching and learning In the spirit of Right Now teaching and learning, I decided to try out Twitter this week as a means of offering the students a learning oriented back channel as well as an opportunity to learn more about emergent content delivery systems and build on their developing knowledge of RSS, aggregation and microformats (all new to them). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
How to start a Twitter hashtag — contentious.com. More and more people are covering live events and breaking news via Twitter — and usually there are several Twitter users covering the same event. Hashtags are a handy tool for pulling together such disparate coverage. A hashtag is just a short character string preceded by a hash sign (#). This effectively tags your tweets — allowing people to easily find and aggregate tweets related to the event being covered. If you’re live-tweeting, you’ll want to know and use an appropriate hashtag. Earlier I explained why it’s important to propose and promote an event hashtag well before the event starts. But where do event hashtags come from? Doyle Albee, maven of the miniskirt theory of writing, asked me: “I’ve used hashtags a bunch, but never started one. Here’s my take on this… Twitter is primarily an in-the-moment medium.
UPDATE: Also, Twitter hashtags are completely ad hoc. Breaking news example: After the coal ash spill disaster in Harriman, TN on Dec. 21, I launched the hashtag #coalash.