February 29, 2008
Will New Messaging Service Catch On With Professors?
This week’s Chronicle has an article that expands on our earlier report on Twitter.
Will Twitter grow in popularity, or will it be something that only the most tech-savvy professors use? —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Friday February 29, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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This article made think that I want to start Twittering. Loved the results he’s getting with his students.
— meredith dickenson Feb 29, 11:11 AM #
i’m an undergraduate student and though i’m just getting started on Twitter, i’ve been keeping up with The Chronicle’s articles about it… and this video was a great format in which to discuss it. not sure if any of my professors will be picking up Twitter any time soon, especially for class, but who knows…
— c.j. rock Mar 1, 10:14 AM #
My experience with using Twitter and anything similar — blogs, Facebook, etc. — for academic purposes is that students just think it is weird, creepy, and geeky in the negative sense. And they think that it’s inappropriate for me to be invading “their” space. Within two days of telling my students that I had a Facebook page, I was blocked from all of them.
So I think it’s not exactly the professors we have to worry about getting on board here.
— Robert Mar 1, 08:35 PM #
Like many social networking technologies (SecondLife comes to mind) Twitter will mainly find pedagogical uses amongst those teaching about such technologies. This is fine. Just don’t assume that the existence of early adopters always signals future broad adoption.
— Mark Mar 3, 09:17 AM #
I’ve had the opposite experience from Robert. I was hesitant to become “friends” with my students on Facebook. (I started the page to keep up with friends from grad school, but I frequently received invites from my students.) So far I have accepted them all, and have kept the information on my profile more professional and less personal as a result.
— JT Mar 3, 09:25 AM #
Students tend to lack strong public speaking ability and proper writing skills. I would rather time be spent in these areas. Twitter might be fun but is it really educational?
— Business Professor Mar 3, 10:12 AM #
If the “institution no longer has walls” then we need to adapt our teaching tools to meet our students’ learning modalities. Part of the challenge with using Twitter in an ethics class is to move beyond the limitations of 140 word “sound bite” to robust ethical reflection. Just as email, chat rooms, blogs and podcasts have changed how we provide content it seems that Twitter also has a place.
— Health Care Ethics Professor Mar 3, 01:47 PM #
All of these socials sites are exactly that – social – and of no educational value or purpose. The idea of education is for those with something worthy to communicate to do so to those who have something to learn that benefits society as a whole. Neither FaceBook, MySpace nor any of the lesser known but equally self-indulgent sites such as Twitter, etc. have any redeeming social value as either education or fact worth knowing.
— David Mar 3, 08:33 PM #
I haven’t used Twitter with a class yet, though we’ve talked about it and I’ve demoed it. To respond to David’s comment that social sites have no educational value, my biggest learning environment at this point is Twitter, and it is completely social. I am able to interact and exchange both the mundane and the profound with friends, colleagues, peers, and some folks that I don’t even know in person. To the naysayers, I would say, don’t shoot it down without giving it a shot first. You might be surprised.
— Vidya A. Mar 6, 07:22 PM #
I’m a teacher, and I believe that education is social. We learn from the people around us. We can learn more, and we can learn it faster. It’s called collective intelligence. If we continue to do things the old way, our students will choose to go elsewhere. They know that the only thing that separates learning in our institutions from learning in less formal environments is a piece of paper that says they’ve learned. The days of a professor standing in front of the class spewing his pre-fab knowledge are numbered. It’s time to harness the power of technology and use it to our advantage. You have to look past the tool and what it is presently being used for to see the possibilities of how you can use it to better educate the digital native students we have in our classes today. I’ll go back to my self indulgent Twittering now.
— Coop Mar 6, 08:58 PM #
Twitter, hard to conceive of, until you make the shift. Thought and connection without excess. In academics and society- much needed. (135 characters from a prof)
— jennar Mar 6, 09:59 PM #
Looks like I found out where the New Flat Earth Society hangs out.
— Alan Mar 7, 01:28 AM #
Thinking about walls through discussion of specific tools, we might think about ways we all (learners and teachers alike) manage distance and walls. Some contexts benefit from compartmentalization and wall-building. Others are more efficient in as completely open an environment as possible. Discussing tools, we can assess the value of different levels of openness or compartmentalization for different learning contexts.
— Alexandre Enkerli Mar 18, 05:08 PM #