to talk lightly and rapidly

So the title comes from the dictionary definition of twitter, but does not entirely represent this post.


Can We Use Twitter for Educational Activities?
Gabriela GROSSECK and Carmen HOLOTESCU
Paper to be presented at The 4th International Scientific Conference eLSE "eLearning and Software for Education", Bucharest, April 17-18, 2008
Starts off describing microblogging systems, of which Twitter is apparently not the only one (at this stage I think I'll keep the scope to Twitter though). States that "940 thousand twitterers in March", I'm assuming thats March of 2008, and that "only half of the users with accounts on Twitter are actually active and have at least a note in the last month" - both of those details are most likely out of date and should be checked up on. The authors list uses of Twitter as blog promotion, PR, politics, news, networking and a tool for small tasks.


They then go off on a tangent discussing Romanian twitterers, a Twitter/Google Maps combination one of them put together (pretty cool, but limited to known Romanian users) and then a Romanian microblogging platform.


The some of educational uses they comment on are:

• Classroom community
• Collaboration: with writing, inter-school or international, project management
• Responding to readings for later
• Exploring language

They follow this with interesting points on the positives and negatives of Twitter and some measures that should be taken when using it. They conclude that it makes a good tool for professional development and student collaboration and models good pedagogy by responding to students' needs. Personally, I think this is a rather strong conclusion when compared to what they stated in the bulk of the article.


Wikipedia: Twitter
As to be expected from Wikipedia when its a topic of notable public interest, the article on Twitter is very good with a range of information on all of the topics relating to Twitter. Of interest, it states that Twitter is funded by venture capitalists and currently has no revenue. It has a breakdown of Twitter content performed by a company in 2009. It gives the statistic that 11% of Twitter users are between 11-17, though notes that this is changing  (how old is it?). If Twitter has such a low school-age usage, how difficult will it be to have students using it in class? It also gives a large list of the usage of Twitter in a variety of environments. While there is a "in education" section, the interesting entries from an education perspective are in the other categories: updates on NASA missions, political campaigns/debates, emergency situations. Observing these things, in real time or as a history, would be a good way to show what happened and people thought.


Wired Campus Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter
An interesting article about a Professor at Pennsylvania State University. What he does is have a dual screen system with one screen showing the lecture material and the second screen showing the Twitter feed. Students are encouraged to tweet ideas, questions or related material for the professor to then discuss. Its passing relevant notes in class. According to the article:

his hope is that the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls

Its an interesting system for University courses, but could it be applied to a primary or secondary school?

academHacK: Twitter for academia
The author starts off by describing that he initially viewed Twitter as "solipsism and sound-bite communication", which to be perfectly honest is how I viewed it myself. However, he set a class assignment where everyone set up an account and then had to follow everyone else and describes it as "one of the better things I did with that class". The reasons he gives is that it allowed conversations to continue outside of the classroom, with real world relationships to class content getting tweeted, and it allowed a sense of community to develop. He then mentions the other benefits of twitter such as following professionals, famous people (really?), instant feedback and a public note pad. The interesting points he makes is that the short message form of Twitter actually teaches grammar, as the messages require specific form and punctuation for them to make sense. This then flows on to rules of written communication and what happens when you change them.

His last suggestion is one I want to try:

Writing Assignments: Remember that game you used to play where one person would start a story, the next person would continue it, etc. . .Okay try this on Twitter.