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…

Of teaching & cooking

Elizabeth Helfant over at Digital Learning Environments Blog has an interesting posting titled The Pancake principle. She makes a connection between technology integration and making pancakes, and offers three tenets of the Pancake principle. This posting is inspired...

Developing a culture of creativity: Research news

Developing a culture of creativity: Research news

Danah Henriksen and I were featured in a recent news story on the MLFTC News titled: Developing a culture of creativity, instead of compliance, in educators. The article provides an overview of our work over the past few years. Given the nature of a news article, it...

Using eclipses to see

Let me start with two questions: First, what is the shape of the Earth? And two, what shapes does the sun cast on the ground when filtered through the leaves of a tree? Of course we know the answer to the first question. The pictures from space show clearly this...

Back from India…

Got back yesterday from a short, hectic but sweet trip to India. I had a wonderful time and still have a lot to do to just document all that happened and connect with all the people I met (hopefully over the next few weeks)... but now it is time to get back to fall...

Arizona in black & white

Arizona in black & white

Over the past two years in Arizona I have had the opportunity to indulge in my love for photography. Recently I felt the need to play with Adobe Sparks - and what better way to learn a new tool than to use it to create a photo album. Enjoy.

Finding myself in EduPunk

Matt Koehler introduce me to the idea of edupunk. As this Chronicle story (Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go 'Edupunk') says, Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter...

Math & Visual Wordplay: New video

Math & Visual Wordplay: New video

The word "math" written such that it has rotational symmetryi.e. it reads the same even when rotated by 180-degrees. The relationship between mathematics and visual wordplay is one I have played with and writing about for a while (More here). I just discovered...

My Illusions on the web

There are a couple of websites that feature work done by me. I had written earlier about Brad Honeycutt's website An Optical Illusion at (http://www.anopticalillusion.com/). He now features four different ambigrams created by me: You can find them on this page on his...

Master’s course wins ATT Award

Just got the news from Carrie Albin, Outreach Coordinator of our Educational Technology Certificate Program (which is part of our Master's in Educational Technology program) that our CEP810 (Teaching for Understanding with Computers) course earned first place in the...

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

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

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

Leave a Reply to Punya Mishra Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *