Twitter during Lectures part 2
Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.
This video is an example on how to use twitter during classroom. The disadvantages encountered so far are:
- There are some topics we discuss that need more information than Twitter’s 140 character limit allows
- “It’s going to be messy but that doesn’t mean bad.” Welcome to the social web, where that’s a great attitude
- Twitter search and archiving are notoriously short-lived so their comments will soon be gone from twitter
- It’s a public forum this can raise concern for privacy. Edmodo is a closed communication forum comparable to twitter but this comes at the expense of public knowledge sharing
- It takes some time before students are used to using this kind of technology and to incorporate it in the lecture or classroom
You can read more about her twitter experience during classroom here “Twitter Experiment” by Monica Rankin (UT Dallas)
Thanks ReadWriteWeb
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July 8, 2009 @ 3:13 pm
The points “140 characters is sometimes too short” and archiving can be addressed by moving over to http://friendfeed.com/ . Creating a “group” there (example: http://friendfeed.com/future-of-education ) would also avoid the need for weekly renewed hashtags, privacy can be set at three different levels, and overall, it’s less messy than Twitter (even though you can of course import any Twitter stream as a feed).