Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
Dear Dr. Moppsie,
I am totally hooked on Twitter. In my opinion, it's the best way ever to get the word out and to let people know what's going on. I wish I could use it with my online class. Do you know of any ways it's being used?
I love online courses, but sometimes they frustrate me because I feel I have to be online to communicate with my classmates. Couldn't we just "tweet"each other?
Signed,
Tweetness and Light in Texas
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Dear Tweetness,
I'm very happy to hear you're excited by Twitter. You're not alone, its just amazing how many people use it to communicate to groups. It's a lot more efficient and immediate than text messaging. In many ways, it's even better than RSS feeds because they're so easy to use with your cell phone.
Twitter is addicting! Yes, I follow several users on Twitter — and, yes, I admit, I follow a few celebrities and also news feeds.
You're right. Twitter can be perfect for e-learning. Instructors can set up a Twitter feed for the class, which has all the class members in it, and it's easy to follow. The instructor can send tweets, and students can "tweet"
to each other.
Tweets, with their short-burst 140-character limit, and the ability to achieve ubiquitous, spontaneous messaging to a potentially massive number of recipients, can be an excellent way to maintain a high level of communication, openness, and motivation.
So, let's take a look at what we can do with Twitter in the e-learning space. First, let's start with instructors.
Instructor Tweets:
- Due dates: Weekly reminders of key due dates are very helpful. In fact, they're key for good time management.
- Critical concepts: Worried that you're missing the major points in the unit or the lesson? Ask the instructor to send out tweets that list the critical / key concepts. They will make mental organizers. You'll be able to start developing a schema for yourself, which will help you create clusters and groups of knowledge. It will be easy to retrieve them.
- Key questions: Sometimes it's a great idea to have a little "twitterfest" your instructor can send out a good question for you to answer (in 140 words or less!) and all the members of your course can tweet a response. It's a wonderful conversation that can take place any time, any where.
- Links to Flickr, YouTube: You may not be able to stream a video or retrieve graphics from a web-based image repository such as Flickr. However, you might be able to send a tweet with a link. You can email the link to yourself and then go to the website once you have a wifi connection and enough bandwidth to download or stream the media files. Alternatively, you can upload your own photos or video and send out a link to the file. It's a great approach if you're taking, say, a biology class, and you're looking for things in the field. For example, you could take pictures of environmental problems - erosion, a pond overrun with algae and pond scum. Your only limits are those of your own imagination. Explore, express, share!
Student Tweets:
Here are a few things you might tweet with your fellow students:
- Questions for professor
- General comments about course content
- Responses to questions
- Notes and observation from the field
- Collaborations
Administrative Tweets:
- Having the ability to contact many people simultaneously is a huge benefit for
college administrators who need to get the word out quickly, especially when
immediate action is called for, such as enrollment deadlines, scholarship
announcements, and more.
- Announcements
- Directions
- Bulletins
- Alerts
Before you start using twitter in your studies
- Can too many tweets constitute a distraction?
- Make sure the tweets are relevant.
- Connect tweets to learning objectives.