TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

Teachers in the networked world face many new challenges.  As Temple University’s Barry Vacker puts it, instructors may find themselves “competing with the entire Internet” as students multitask during class with laptops and cell phones.  But what if instructors could actually use the very tools that seem to be deteriorating students’ attention to increase student interest and productivity in class?  One way instructors are exploring this is by encouraging interaction during class with what is called a “backchannel discussion.”

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In his TeachOIT post “Twitter: What’s the Point?“, Tony explained a few ways Twitter has been useful to him both socially and professionally.  I’d like to add a further way that Twitter has improved my academic life.  As a graduate student, finding the motivation to do academic writing can be…elusive at times.  Many doctoral candidates find membership in academic writing groups to be one way to overcome this obstacle.  But whereas such groups sometimes can be too formal or rigidly scheduled, building an academic writing community through Twitter offers a flexible network of writing buddies.  If I make an impromptu plan to go to a local café for two hours of academic writing, I can instantly let my Twitter writing buddies know where I’ll be.  If they want to join me, they can simply show up.  If they’re otherwise occupied, they can ignore my post. 

Twitter has served me well in this capacity.  You might try it yourself or recommend it to graduate students you advise or teach.  A variation might even be fruitful for undergraduate class projects.

To see the nuts and bolts of creating a writing network, see the next page…

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During last week’s “Overview of Emerging Technology” a good portion of the audience indicated an interest in hearing about Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service that is receiving lots of press coverage. The general question people asked is “what’s the point?” I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a year so I demoed how Twitter looks and mumbled through an ad-hoc explanation of why it is useful to me. The short version of what I had to say was: “If there are no people you care about who use Twitter, chances are you won’t care about Twitter; but if there are people you care about who use Twitter, maybe you will care.” 

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For our first Emerging Technology & Pie event of the semester Steve Fox, lecturer in the Journalism Department, joined us to  present on his use of Facebook and Twitter in undergraduate Journalism courses. We had a good number of new faces showed up, and a wide range of ages and departments were represented in the group that came to hear about Steve’s use of Facebook for instruction.

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The Amherst Wire has an article discussing the use of micro-blogging tool Twitter by UMass Journalism students to cover the presidential debate. UMass journalism professors Steve Fox, Scott Brodeur and BJ Roche asked their students to contribute to a “#umassprez2″ topic that would group all of their posts together. Posts were automatically grouped on an updating page that would continually show the live play-by-play comments from the students watching the debate. Instructors were interested to see if a tool like Twitter would cause students to transition from observer to participant.

Traffic from contributing students on #umassprez2 was so fast and furious that it got picked up as a “hot topic” on Twitter, thrusting it into the spotlight for other Twitter users to see. This in turn caught the eye of representatives of the Obama and McCain campaigns who joined in with responses, links to resources, and general spin based on the students’ comments and questions. Professor Steve Fox said, “This was an experiment in an emerging new technology and it had the hidden benefit of engaging students in the political process.”

Reade the full article at:
http://www.amherstwire.com/2008/10/08/on-debate-night-umass-classes-aflutter-over-twitter/

More on Twitter:

• Our Overview of Twitter
• “Ambient Awareness” in Social networks?

Clive Thompson has an interesting piece in the last New York Times Magazine that explores the concept of “ambient awareness” as manifested in social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. I find this concept of ambient awareness fascinating, and the article presents an interesting perspective on the potential effects, and even possible value, of using these tools.

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As we move into the last few weeks of the semester our Wednesday Web 2.0 posts will be looking at some of the more “emerging” Web 2.0 services. This means we’ll be looking as some tools that are probably not as well established as things like wikis and blogs, but you’ll get a chance to hear about some of the newer, weirder, and wackier tools out there. Some of these tools are just beginning to creep into instructional use; you may seem some of them in a classroom near you soon, others may simply be the awkward precursors to a new generation of tools that has yet to emerge.

Today’s Web 2.0 tool is Twitter, a web services that has been receiving a great deal of press coverage in the last few months.

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