David Silver is using Twitter in his media studies classes (check out the amazing “Eating San Francisco”). Twitter is the class’ main mode of communication, and he writes that Twitter has replaced three classroom technologies:
twitter has replaced the class listserv. for years, i’ve used a listserv (alternatively called a mailing list or discussion list) to extend our discussions beyond the classroom. these days, when we want to continue conversations, the 12 students in DMP, the 17 students in ESF, and i use twitter.
twitter has replaced email announcements. in the past, if something’s come up, or i want to add a reading, or we have a location change, i would send all the students in class an email. these days, when i have something to announce, or when my students have something to announce, we use twitter.
twitter has replaced the cardboard box i used to bring to class on due dates. in the past, my students would print out their papers and bring them to class; i’d collect them in a box and take them back to the office to grade. these days, my students write blogs, design flickr sets, upload video, and post works-in-progress. when finished, they tweet about it so that i – and, more importantly, their peers – can check it out.
This is instructive for designers of educational technology. The “traditional” trajectory of educational technology is specialization and feature-creep. For example, a class must have an email list, a forum, website/CMS, each with its own space and identity. When I log into BlackBoard, I see about 30 different things I can do, and for each I have to click a link and go to a page to do the action. Twitter strips away the features, instead using an inherently flexible textual space to facilitate communication, accomplishing the same goal of other feature-ridden “course technology.”
I see Twitter’s artificial limit on post size as an important factor in classroom success. First, it keeps the information space managable, meaning information is economized and easily retrievable. Second, and this is pure speculation, but I see Twitter’s short form as a communication equalizer. In any class, you’re going to have verbose individuals and quiet individuals – the same applies online. Twitter forces the verbose to be concise, and it makes it easy for the quiet/reluctant to contribute “normally.” To illustrate this point, let’s imagine a traditional class forum. Our verbose individuals may contibute multi-paragraph posts. Our quiet individuals may look at those long posts, struggle to replicate them, and end up not enjoying or participating in online communication. We’ve lost “communication” because a student struggled to replicate a “form.” In the case of Twitter, the difference between the verbose and the quiet is 140 characters. Form goes away, more or less, and the forum focuses primarily on the communication of raw ideas. Again, this is just speculation – but there’s plent of research in CMC on media richness and form effects that might provide theoretical basis for this sort of research question.
In my class, we’ve used Facebook groups for discussions with (in my opinion) great success. We’ve also experimented with Ning, where that success was not replicated. I believe that Ning suffered from the problems endemic to BlackBoard and other CMS – too many functions, too many buttons to push, too many markup styles to remember. This “overfunctioning” leads to a segmentation of communication, and in an online discussion where communicants may be reluctant, segmentation is death. Twitter is the opposite of segmentation, forcing all communication through a single, flexible channel. This creates the impression of activity, again stimulating discussion.
If I were going to build a CMS (Course Management Software), I would start with Twitter as the prototype, and only add features to the dashboard screen. In this sense, the CMS would only have one page, and everything would tie into and key off the communication sream (i.e I would join Twitter with something like Facebook’s News Feed). If I were to employ Twitter in my classes, one thing I might ask for is “Groups” or “Rooms.” It would be a challenge for me to keep track of all of my student communication (though a second Twitter account would probably suffice).
Alternatively, you could use a richer client like Tweetdeck that allows you to create groups in the UI. That way you could leverage the Twitter infrastructure (and enjoy the occasional fail whale) instead of building something new. I’ve found Tweetdeck quite useful as I follow more people and try to sort through the noise to find the things that really interest me.
The key to this working in a classroom setting would seem to be the right set of students. I think we have an assumption that students will jump on something like Twitter, but at least here at UNC Chapel Hill that doesn’t really seem to be the case. Given, Twitter doesn’t have a huge learning curve, but there would be some training involved.
I also wonder about archiving the tweets. Twitter is pretty immediate and ephemeral – get a link or a topic, react and move on – is that the kind of dialog and knowledge sharing that really works in an educational setting?
I totally see what you’re saying Fred, but I also think that (right or wrong) institutions often still can’t get their heads around publicly accessible open streams of information.
They tend to want walled gardens and places where archived lists and searchable indexes rule the day.
Putting Twitter and something like Tweetdeck in their hands is probably beyond many of those in power.
Brian, Your points about archiving are well taken. I would argue that Twitter is ephemeral conversation. It is classroom chat taken virtual. Simply because it is digitized, we don’t need to archive it (or even keep it around much longer than a week). But there is a strong imperative to archive everything, so I know that this twitter concept will probably seem controversial. I wonder..do universities archive online chats? Twitter is an online chat, just a little bit more stateful.
James, this is why I like being an idea guy. But in my opinion, the courseware model is broken. Courseware is more like a filing cabinet and less like an open mediator and facilitator of discussion. Twitter shows us another path. Of course, the history of technology is littered with “better products,” and Blackboard wields a lot of anticompetitive power in the space.
hey fred – thanks for discussing my blog post and some of my experiments in the classroom.
i’ll be eager to learn more about your experiences with facebook. one of my main problems with facebook, though, is the same problem i have with blackboard: i don’t want a walled off virtual space for my students. i want my students to create, upload, share, converse, and collaborate publicly – for all to see.
i appreciate the comments brian and james make. but i’m not sure i agree with brian when he writes, “Twitter is pretty immediate and ephemeral – get a link or a topic, react and move on – is that the kind of dialog and knowledge sharing that really works in an educational setting?”
granted, a tweet is brief and at 140 characters or less it can only contain so much knowledge. but i encourage my students to post *thick tweets* – tweets that contain multiple layers of information and, with the help of hyperlinks, serve as portals to additional information (photo sets, videos, essays).
it’s way too early for me to have a strong opinion about twitter in the classroom but so far i’m extremely impressed with its ease of use and ability to foster a quick and easy network for sharing.
thanks again for the blog post and all my (and sarah’s) best to you and yours!
Hi,
Very interesting experiments with twitter in classroom.
I would like to share our experience in delivering entire online courses, courses enhancement, group projects using the microblogging platform designed for education http://www.cirip.eu – a few resources at http://linkbun.ch/7g89 .
Thanks,
Carmen
” same problem i have with blackboard: i don’t want a walled off virtual space for my students. i want my students to create, upload, share, converse, and collaborate publicly – for all to see.”
Wow, that in itself is reason enough to look into this more closely. I love the open culture idea, but there are a lot of fears that some people will have to get past before we can use this. I think that once we begin to share and open those closed course discussions authentic learning will spread like wild fire. I’ve been asking this question a lot lately, but why do we all have to have the same conversations behind closed doors sharing spilling out only drops of the value onto the web and culture? Open it up let’s discuss and learn with and from each other, there’s some brilliance being blocked behind antiquated models of learning.
Michael
Just out of curiosity, what is the rationale behind wanting students’ work to be exposed to public view? Have you ever encountered student resistance to that? Are there any reasons NOT to make student work public?
ack – i hope i’m not colonizing fred’s most excellent blog with all my comments!
michael and nathan – regarding having my students’ work published publicly, i encourage you to read my blog post, twitter assignment. more specifically, i encourage you to read the comments which include the views and perspectives of three of my students enrolled in my course digital media production. i believe that my students explain it better than i could.
as for nathan’s question – are there any reason NOT to make student work public – i am sure there are gobs of reasons but i’ll let others take a stab at it.
thanks again for the comments and my apologies again for colonizing this here blog! =)
I definitely agree with your comments about current LMS offerings – they are all cumbersome, difficult to navigate, difficult to deliver course information without assigning rigid categories, and offer only anemic collaboration tools. Personally, if I were going to build a new LMS, I’d base it off Facebook, which already includes an elegant and intuitive navigation system, several ways to collaborate and built-in application store (think learning object repository).
As for Twitter specifically, to me it’s only one more walled-in garden – the information is only available through Twitter, unless you use RSS. That, for me, is the key to effectively using Twitter – RSS. By using something like Yahoo Pipes, you can ingest several different RSS sources (like Twitter, Delicious, Diigo, news feeds, blogs and more), filter the stream down to only what you want, and make that content available to students. Students will collaborate and contribute to the content of the course as they bookmark sites with Delicious, make Twitter comments, and use the other services your course ingests, and the stream represents the class’ entire use of web2.0 tools. Additionally, for courses that are taught every semester or year, you begin to build a permanent warehouse of filtered, searchable content for future students.
Of course, you still have to host that feed somewhere, but at least the content is no longer part of a walled-in garden – use Moodle, set up a wiki, or use a multitude of other open web-based applications that can be configured to not require authentication to view the material (if that’s your cup of tea).
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Thanks for the insight. Glad to see that Twitter is used for educational purposes in so many different ways!
Just one question:
Do you all have protected updates or have you created a new twitter-account just for school?
I think some other services such as identi.ca have the advantage that they actually have groups instead of artificial ones in twitter, using tweetdeck, etc. as a client.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Cheers,
Stefan
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[...] Unit Structures – Twitter as Courseware [...]
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