Twittering in class, what’s the big deal?

by | Thursday, April 09, 2009

Noah Ullman just forwarded me this story in the The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Professor encourages students to pass notes during class via twitter. It is amazing to me that this merited being called news. If you have been following this blog you know that this is something I have been playing with for a while (in fact based on a suggestion made by Noah). For the record, here are some links to what I had written: Microblogging in the classroom & Microblogging in the classroom II. In fact one of my students even tried it out in an undergraduate course he was teaching that semester.

I see this as a way of fruitfully utilizing the fact that all my students bring laptops to the classroom (something I have written about here and here)… seems a better solution than having them just check email or update their facebook status 🙂

It seems to me that the story didn’t speak to one critical aspect of micro-blogging, how is the twitter feed brought back into the classroom discussion. The problem is that the microblogging tends to exist in a separate “space” from what the class is doing – and coming up with strategies for integrating these two spaces (the face to face AND the microblogging) is what is key. Finding the right balance is is something we struggled with in our experiments. One thing we learned, no big surprise here, is that context matters. A tool that works one way in a doctoral seminar with a dozen or so participants works very differently in an undergraduate class with twice that number of students.

Figuring out the parameters within which these new technologies and tools can be used is what we need to pay attention to. More often than not the discussion is restricted to the “tool” not its pedagogic application. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the comments that follow the Chronicle article. Take a look at them, they tend to follow the time honored rules of talking at cross purposes, with some of the silly comments that, sadly, characterize internet discourse.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Computational Thinking paper wins Outstanding Paper

Computational Thinking paper wins Outstanding Paper

A paper co-authored with Jon Good and Aman Yadav, building on Jon's practicum study has received the Outstanding Paper Award at the SITE 2017. Complete reference, link to article and abstract given below. Good. J., Yadav. A., & Mishra, P....

The death of the university?

Zephyr Teachout (supposedly an associate law professor at Fordham University, a writer, and an online entrepreneur) has a great article on bigmoney.com, titled Welcome to Yahoo! U: The Web will dismember universities, just like newspapers. His essential argument is...

Design & the Creation of artifacts

I just discovered through the PhD-Design list an online book titled "Design: Creation of artifacts in society" by Karl T. Ulrich. Ulrich is a professor at Wharton School. The book is entirely available online and is licensed under the Creative Commons license. I have...

David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire

David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire

A teacher affects eternity—Henry Adams I remember the first time I saw David Zola teach. He was on stage in front of 200+ undergraduate students with a plastic cup of wine in his hand. The wine had been poured for him by a teaching assistant from a bottle hidden in a...

The medium is the massage

Nicholas Carr has an interesting post (titled Rewiring the mind) on the findings of a recent study into the information seeking behaviors of scholars. (The full study in pdf format can be downloaded here.) Carr seems to suggest that these results indicate a...

Orissa Folklore

Just got an email from a fellow Mishra (no relationship, at least I don't know of any), Dr. Mahendra Mishra who works as the state tribal education coordinator in my home state of Orissa as a part of it's Primary Education Program (more at www.opepa.in). Mahendra He...

Designing for Creative Learning Environments: New chapter

Designing for Creative Learning Environments: New chapter

In 2017, Carmen Richardson and I co-authored a paper (Richardson & Mishra, 2017) introducing SCALE: Support of Creativity in Learning Environment: SCALE, a tool created to evaluate how well educational settings foster student creativity. Unlike formal evaluation...

Collaborative Haiku

Collaborative Haiku

A silent white boardScribble a first line, and waitEmergent haiku. Last Friday, goofing off between meetings, I scribbled one line, five syllables long, on one of the  white-boards in our office space. Within a few minutes, lo and behold, was a lovely haiku,...

4 Comments

  1. Mary Brown

    you always have your own unique view on things! Congratz!!!

    Reply
  2. Aroutis

    I asked my self the same question….whats the big deal? Last summer 2008, Jim Reineke (http://jreineke.wordpress.com/) and I taught a masters course in educational technology and used twitter as one of several technologies to help in teaching the course and doing assignments.

    The University of Phoenix online announced about three weeks ago that they may have courses that are taught entirely using twitter.

    I think someone on the order like Al Gore is needed to publicize TPACK. Someone outside of academia with some star power (Bill Gates, etc.) because within academia one would look like a cheerleader and probably lose credibility. This is necessary because people would become familiar with TPACK and understand that any technology can be a learning technology depending how it is creatively re-purposed or designed considering pedagogy and content within a particular context.

    Reply
  3. Punya Mishra

    Thanks Matt for your comments. A couple of other postings allude to similar ideas as well (see the guest posting on Nashworld, as well as the previous one on Translating French Lieutenant’s Woman for some more thoughts on these complex issues).

    Reply
  4. Matt T.

    Well said, Punya. I previously cringed when I read about topics such as “Top 10 ways to use cell phones in the classroom” or “What do you think about using XYZ application in education?” Your TPACK framework, as we’ve discussed several times previously, has provided me with a framework to think about connecting technology tools with teaching. In response to the above-mentioned questions, my response now tends to be something like “who are your students? What concept are you teaching? What pedagogy might enable you be better teach that concept to your intended audience?”…and then “Does this particularly technology tool enable you to better teach that concept using the identified pedagogy?” Finding the middle of the Venn diagram takes knowledge in all three areas (and much thought/time as well!). As always, thanks for your insightful post.

    Reply

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  1. video phones - video phones... you got some good points, but i'm not really convinced of this. and i got to much confusion…

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