Twittering and tweets- What’s all the chirping about?
Posted by Harvey on March 16, 2009 in Web 2.0
Twitter is a social media service that has been generating significant buzz for a while now. It seems almost everyone in traditional media is now using twitter, and letting you know you that can follow their tweets @someaddress.
Okay, but what is Twitter? The following video from the nice people at Commoncraft can get you started in understanding this service a little better:
So now maybe you have a better understanding of how Twitter lets you send quick sms messages of 140 characters or less, but you may still wonder what’s the point and what relevance does this service have for Education and learning?Apart from the seemingly trivial updates that in aggregate might serve to flesh out our lives to others interested in daily minutiae, it is pretty easy to ask what’s the point? However Twitter is better understood as a technology tool; it does not have a clear purpose, but rather uses. Twitter as a communication tool has been applied for Red Cross updates, news reporting, and professional knowledge sharing.
In Education, Twitter can be used to provide quick updates where information sharing is integral to a collaborative process. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Twitter is that it is based on SMS or text-messaging, and not dependent on computer and Internet access. In most school settings, one-to-one access is unavailable, and yet increasingly students have mobile phones with SMS capabilities. Thus far most schools have tried to draw a line at the schoolyard gate and hold ground against the entertainment aspects of student technologies that “distract and disrupt” learning. However, it may be the case that schools and educators need to learn to leverage the technologies students themselves bring into the classroom to help students responsibly understand how to apply tools like mobile phones and Twitter to increase their productivity and learning.
March 16th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Great tool, Twitter. And just as blogs can be much more than a daily journal, so too can Twitter be much more than a journal “light”. Twitter is an important part of my PLN – personal learning network – keeping me in touch with educators worldwide, 24/7.
The district recently lifted filter restrictions on automatic Twitter updates (critical to its use), so it is very exciting now to be at my cws, with live updates from my network, all day long.
Twitter can put a very large network of individuals, personally chosen, at one’s fingertips – for problem solving, collaboration, sharing, exploration, and much more.
Anybody twittering the next ET meeting? I’d love to tune in. Thanks – Mark
Twitter ID: mahlness