Embracing the Twitter Classroom

David Parry started using Twitter with his University of Texas at Dallas students in 2007. A teacher at Hope Charter School in Philadelphia, PA taught his students to mark themselves present and record their in-class accomplishments on the site. Penn State professor Cole Camplese maintains a screen full of his students' Twitter streams throughout each class.

Laymen have replaced trained experts as the people who define what's true in our world, and some educators are embracing the collaborative trend. As traditional reporting gives way to citizen journalism, and user-generated review sites like Yelp attract more traffic than renowned publications like Zagat, it's prudent to teach collaboration, too.

This year, M.I.T.'s physics department moved away from professorial spiels and toward group work. "Just as you can't become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV," said Harvard Professor Eric Mazur, who influenced M.I.T. to shift, "likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it." The upshot: a more than 50-percent drop in failure rate.

Teaching students to learn from and with each other is a wise acknowledgment that more and more, students are relying on their peers for information. Sixty-five percent of Americans aged 12-17 and 67 percent of those aged 18-32 use social networking sites, according to the Pew Research Center. Students' lives are infused with each other's viewpoints.

Teachers and professors like Parry and Camplese are taking group work to the next logical step: incorporating social media into their classrooms. In lieu of fighting teens' use of networking sites, they are communicating with students in a language that they understand.

Parents -- especially of younger students -- don't always love the idea of their kids using social media. "I guess my point is (IMHO) if I found out that my 6th grader's school time was being used to learn about Twitter, MySpace, or any other social tool, that school would be getting a rather terse phone call from me. Teach my kid math, english, history, etc. I'll teach him about twitter etc....when I think he's ready and so that I can set boundaries," one father wrote in response to a post on using Twitter in the classroom.

This argument is akin to that for abstinence-only education. Kids with access to the Internet are going to use it whether or not their parents decide they're "ready." Teachers who enable students to use sites like Twitter for maximum gain -- to learn from their peers, converse around issues that matter to them, and follow people they admire -- build on students' experience rather than encourage it to develop black market-style.

Bringing social media into classrooms is "challenging the 1000-yr-old paradigm that you have to learn from a master and the only way to do that is to go to lecture and take notes," said Howard Rheingold, who teaches at UC Berkeley's School of Communication and Stanford University. He has also developed the Social Media Classroom, a set of tools for professors to incorporate Internet-based collaboration into their classes.

Rheingold points to five reasons for teaching students social media:

1. Developing students' literacy in our new online environment is as crucial as developing their abilities to read and write. Communication is moving toward social media. We can either help students thrive in this environment or leave them flailing.
2. Many students bring their computers to class. Why not work with this trend instead of fighting or ignoring it?
3. Social media is just that: social. Students who use Twitter for class are "learning collaborative skills that are particularly important today."
4. There is only so much class time. Rheingold makes mini-lectures on video that students comment on between classes, allowing more time to engage the issues through in-class discussion.
5. Shy students who hold back in class often speak up online. "If you can extend the discussion to an online message board, you enable students who may not jump into the discussion," he said, to "make a thoughtful contribution."

Other teachers and professors cite similar benefits. "The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class," Parry wrote in 2008 of his college students. "Once students started twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space."

Bringing sites like Twitter into the educational space is unorthodox. Skeptics argue that writing in 140-character bursts ruins students' spelling and grammar, that social media will become an excuse for students to chit-chat their way through class, that micro-blogging services are ruining kids' attention spans.

But the point of teaching students to use social media isn't just to embrace a novel trend: it's to help students become literate in our networking-based society. Like teaching students to use condoms, it's not about doing it, but doing it right.

For more information about how Twitter works, watch this video. Feel free to contact Jessica Gross via email or follow her on Twitter.

 

Comments

[hatchethead]

This article focuses on Twitter, and I would like to point out two related concepts that article could very easily incorporate.

First, vast amounts of evidence are accumulating in the area of research on learning to support the assertion that lecture-based methods are the worst way of stimulating learning. (Lecture fosters a memorize-r­egurgitate­-forget cycle of learning with a short retention horizon.) This evidence strongly suggests that active and engaged learning is the way to go. Unfortunately, lecture-based teaching is 'easy' for teachers/p­rofessors, so figuring out how to help educators incorporate inquiry-based methods (like the use of social networking for collaborative learning) is going to be a great challenge. Dr. Mazur has been a leader in these efforts in the physics community.

Second, while Twitter is setting the standard for synchronous, real time micro-blogging, there are other tools that might be more appropriate for the classroom or learning. For example, FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com) offers the same time of real-work micro-blogging experience with the added features of commenting (which allows grouped discussions on a topic established by a Tweet, for example), private rooms, rich search capability, and integration with other services such as Twitter and Facebook.

[Thomas Ho]

It's my experience as a post-secondary educator that students don't "get" Twitter and for that matter, they don't get much beyond Facebook! To me, that's a good enough reason to show them Twitter and other tools for teaching and learning so that they will realize that there is so much MORE available to help them learn than the time that they might "waste" on Facebook where I spend much less time anymore.

I like Twitter for discovery and because of that, I now use it IN PLACE OF my RSS reader because I depend on the Twitter "crowd" to tell me what's important because I need some way of figuring out what deserves my ATTENTION since I can't keep up with all of the RSS feeds that I would want to read. Twitter is important because it has fostered an ECOSYSTEM that now offers a rich array of services whose POTENTIAL for teaching and learning that we are just beginning to understand and appreciate!

My own experiment with Twitter in a class was conducted during the previous semester at http://cit499.info Although it was only moderately successful, I learned enough from the experience to try again next semester and I now know better what to do (and NOT to do) in order to improve the experience. Read more at Mark Krynsky's blog at http://bit.ly/cit499lifestreamblog which explains WHY it's important for students to "get" social media for personal branding to get an advantage in job-hunting.

[Paramendra Bhagat]

Twitter is a vast classroom.
http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2009/02/tcc-twitter-community-college.html

[dstlearn]

Hi had a chance recently to experience Twitter as a learner. At the ASCD conference in Orlando this year, a Twitter hashtag #ascd09 was used. Mixed with free wireless, this meant that if I heard something interesting or something that I needed to ask a question about, I would simply tweet it with that hashtag. Within seconds there were replies coming from other rooms connecting what I was saying with the sessions they were attending. In some cases the presenter would bring the search up on their screen using the tweets as assessment for learning and adjusted the presentation accordingly.

[blueshield]

Hmmm.

It may come as a shock that social networking in and out of the classroom was going on long before a transistor was small enough to fit in a shoebox. Cram together, trade notes, have fun, have fun...did I say, have fun.... The main difference I see with electronics, is you can do it anonymously at all times, and your group can be bigger.

But, try walking in to a large group of strangers and come out after two hours with a team of people willing to work together on a project. That's networking, and it will teach you far more about yourself and other people than a week twittering.

And "Laymen have replaced trained experts as the people who define what's true in our world" is not a GOOD thing at all. Get out into the world and actually meet some of those laymen before you make up your mind. I would not have laymen raise my children, perform surgery on my back, assemble my car, design my clothes, fly my airplane, or invest my money, sorry, no matter how much they twitter.

And you have a long ways to go before you convince me you've learned calculus from your followers.

I suggest a slightly different take on your last point, teaching students to use condoms: if you're having sex in class, the condom will not make you smarter.

[Merve Emre]

Jess --

You might also note the trend towards collaborative writing via Twitter: http://davidpogue.com/bio_photos/twitter.html.

Twitter makes me paranoid. I've always thought of it as a form of phatic monologue/dialogue - most posts are speech acts which contain little informative substance, and simply prolong the act of communication. Instead of having a specific, utility-based purpose, they reaffirm that the "channel" (in this case, the Internet) works as a medium. Naturally, there's a level of addictiveness that arises as the user continually seeks confirmation that his/her Twittering is "heard" ... maybe that's why your condom analogue at the end is so fantastically apt.

[Tony McNeill]

Interesting tweet on Twitter's 'ambient sociablity' by Guy Merchant contesting the view that Twitter's function is only phatic -

Merchant, G. (2009). Ambient sociability. My Vedana. Retrieved May 20, 2009, from http://myvedana.blogspot.com/2009/05/ambient-sociability.html

[Merve Emre]

Not directly related to phatic communication, but still Twitter-worthy: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/soar01_.html

On how Twitter has destroyed the @ sign ....

[fleaba]

Social networking sites are a complete time sucking black hole.

[Shirley Fisk]

5/18/09
11:45pm
Alexandria,VA

I'm.not.a.­teacher.bu­t.I.have.b­een.a.subs­titute.tea­cher...Any­thing.that­.will.enga­ge.the.stu­dents.and.­also.prepa­re.them.fo­r.the.real­.world.is.­good..

[Praguer]

As a person working in the "real world," what I can say is that we are less and less happy with our young people that we are hiring. They claim that they can multi-task. There couldn't be anything further than the truth. What we see is poorer and poorer communication skills face-to-face, and an addiction to Facebook. Our young employees seem to think that they can be on Facebook all day while doing their job. We see less productivity and more errors than our older employers (i.e. over 40's)

Though this may be how students spend their leisure time, schools should encourage in-class social interaction (and not twitter OR professionarial lectures ad nauseum). Students also need to know WHEN to use the tools they have. It seems that some schools are not helping students to "disconnect." This is an unhealthy tred..

As for students teaching students, I doubt that they able to teach each other what we do in our job - the tax laws of the Czech Republic. Some things, sadly enough, our best communicated by training by professionals. The writer of this article betrays the arrogance of many in the tech field as well as among the younger generation. I think that Jessica should get out more into the real work world and see that though technology has seriously improved our jobs, human networking is the key - and not a lot of twitter.