Almost every teacher I know who uses Twitter has—at least once—batted around the idea of trying to figure out an effective way to use Twitter in the classroom. This has less to do with the fact that Twitter is the best medium from classroom communication and more to do with the fact that technology inclined educators have a notoriously bad habit of feeling obligated to use every Web 2.0 service on this green earth in their classroom in some shape or form.
Dr. Monica Rankin integrated Twitter into her college classroom. The result is a video aptly named “The Twitter Experiment” and a page of her thoughts and comments on the experiment.
I was reading through some of the feedback on the YouTube page for this video. The first comment posted addressed the viewers apprehension that students were losing their ability to speak up for themselves and posited that this isn’t particularly good for the workplace. Having an interactive environment where everyone can engage in the lecture through whichever medium is best suited for the situation and their disposition won’t be a detriment to the work place. Dr. Rankin isn’t stopping students from interjecting with a question or comment, she’s simply giving them another avenue. There is a subset of people who believe that anything that isn’t immediately transferrable to a 1950s-era workplace is automatically bad news—I don’t agree.
As I read the comment, I instantly thought of a post on New Classroom Rules posted by Rob Jacobs at his blog, Education Innovation. In particular, the comments made me think of two of Rob’s new rules.
5. Talk only when permitted, text at all other times.
12. Keep your hands to yourself, but share all your ideas and knowledge with others in your Personal Learning Network.
I’m willing to put some money on the fact that students communicating via Twitter about the lecture where a lot more engaged in the material than the students in the next room over who were doodling in their notebooks and texting their friends. If it gets students more excited about learning then we ought to be doing it. As educators, we can’t constantly be fretting over what the workplace of the future will be looking for. That’s like fighting yesterday’s war when we should be focused on tomorrow’s.
That being said, I’m still not entirely sure that Twitter is the best medium for this kind of communication. A closed ecosystem like P2 for Wordpress might have a much better signal to noise ratio.
(via So You Want To Teach)
