Comments on: So You Want to Microblog (Twitter) With Your Students?

By: medea

medea — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:48:58 +0000

I´m teaching an undergraduate course on emerging media in Colombia, and I have set up twitter with the students. We are using it only online, no cell phone twittering since some students don´t have cellphones, or their cellphones are truly basic, nevertheless it has worked out for us, notices about class schedules, interesting websites, recommendations and questions about assignments are daily topics on twitter. I did create a separate account and they wrote their profile names on the board and everyone proceeded to add everyone else.

By: Jeffrey Kahn

Jeffrey Kahn — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:49:20 +0000

Any suggestions on how to work twitter when you are teaching two different classes in one semester? It sounds like with this method, each class would get all updates even it was meant for only one of the classes.

By: Ryan Collins

Ryan Collins — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:06:53 +0000

Twitter makes this even easier for you, you don’t have to have the accounts setup ahead of time. The students only have to send “follow eng205z” to 40404 and they’ll automatically start following the class name. I think it also allows them to setup their Twitter account too.

By: dave

dave — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:35:33 +0000

Alex,
I prefer twitter for its integration with the cell phone. For me, this is sort of the kill feature/important part of Twitter, that it works through SMS messaging. Now granted I haven’t used some of the other tools as much, so they might have gotten better with cell phone integration (some don’t even offer it). But I am not married to twitter by any means, indeed I look forward to someone building a stable, reliable version of twitter.

By: Alex Reid

Alex Reid — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:17:55 +0000

Thanks for the info Dave. I’m curious as to your thoughts about different microblogging tools. Why twitter over pownce for example? Assuming Jaiku comes out of invite only at some point, perhaps the channels feature might work as a different way of doing this.

By: Brian Croxall

Brian Croxall — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:23:14 +0000

Insightful instructions as always. I’m going to be using Twitter in a series of comp classes I’m teaching this fall on the subject of “Your Digital Life,” but I hadn’t yet thought of how I would get everyone tracking each other. This is a much simpler strategy than the Google Doc I would have probably gone with.

By: Amy Cavender, CSC

Amy Cavender, CSC — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:24:12 +0000

Thanks for a really useful post. I’ve learned quite a lot from your blog (including the joys of Devonthink!).

Maybe I missed them in the sites you linked to, but two good mobile apps for Twitter are TwitterBerry and jTwitter. They’re both pretty intuitive, and they’re handy for odd ducks like me who have a data plan but no text messaging package for the cell phone.

By: Mark Crane

Mark Crane — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:41:39 +0000

I wish I had read this yesterday before I emailed my students and told them “Hey, check out twitter and follow me.” Duh! I cancelled that experiment but will attempt it anew in the Fall with a dedicated twitter account. I realized I don’t really want my students to read the stream of sinus headache updates and fart jokes that my twitter stream has become.

By: Shannon Ritter

Shannon Ritter — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:50:32 +0000

I’m currently working as the Social Networks Adviser for the online campus of a Big 10 university and we recently had a symposium dedicated to teaching and learning with technology which drew people from all over our university system. The keynote speaker was Lawrence Lessig and to say that it was an amazing day would be an understatement.

The most amazing thing in my opinion, though, was how the use of twitter changed the entire experience for so many of the attendees. Having met and discussed the symposium on twitter prior to attending or even meeting in person for the first time, the event itself became almost like a ‘family reunion’ of people we’d never met in person.

We took advantage of tagging and the use of hashtags.org as we planned, attended and commented on the event and now we have the benefit of an archived version of our thoughts from the day located here: http://hashtags.org/tag/tltsymposium2008/ .

Another interesting thing to note is that one of the graduate level classes here on campus on ‘Disruptive Technologies” was exploring the use of twitter in the classroom and through that exploration, they were able to engage the people they’d met at the TLT Symposium and have classroom discussions with us even though we were all located in different areas around campus.

I really enjoy your blog and have found myself really coming to rely on twitter not only for the day-to-day conversations among colleagues and friends, but to connect with people outside my office allowing me to really learn, grow and change my perspectives on many levels.

-Shannon Ritter
micala (twitter)