Twitter for Educators
Following up a blog post by Tom Scheinfeldt on using Twitter as an outreach tool, I recently came across a service under development called Edmodo. Billing itself as “Twitter for teachers and students,” Edmodo is in alpha testing as a social educational portal, including a classroom-calendaring feature. Based upon the screen capture of the service, I don’t see how this is significantly different than Twitter. In fact, the Twitter API could be used to build a service like this. So while this is nothing groundbreaking, it caused me to reflect on some of the significant changes in social networking of the past year, and how those changes are trickling into online educational tools.
In my judgment the largest shift we’ve seen is that of a “friends activity feed.” In the case of Facebook, I can be notified when my friends modify their profiles, add other friends, or perform any activity (as long as they haven’t disallowed the display of these messages). And while that information was available before, its display is now one of the core features of Facebook itself. Your “news feed” shows the activities of your friends upon logging in. Since then, Myspace has followed suit with a similar feature. These features encourage users to be active on the site in order to gain the attention of others, or be seemingly overlooked among your other collection of virtual friends.
The other change that has been developing is the idea of providing your “status.” In some ways, I see this as an outgrowth of the AOL Instant Messenger away message. Depending on the person, away messages can be informative, have song lyrics, or be an ambiguous word. So has become the nature of the social networking “status.” The free-form nature of it allows anyone to express what they’re feeling or doing at the moment. Twitter’s sole purpose is to express these statuses, while many other social networks offer it as a feature of a larger and further complex social network.
The merging of these two ideas offers interesting pedagogical possibilities for educators who can think outside the box. What are ways that providing a “status,” or sharing text-messages in a public space engages students? What is the benefit of students seeing the activity of their peers in real-time? How can these tools build a greater sense of community and cooperative learning between students?
The nature of social networks often demands a high level of participation in order for them to be worthwhile to participants, and seeing the activity stream of your classmates is only helpful if you check it once, or several times a day. So while the tool can facilitate rapid dialogue between classmates, its usefulness is based upon the students in the class and their decision to be constantly hooked-in, or to not be. Its worth mentioning that other web tools for learning like wikis, blogging, forums, and listservs facilitate the public distribution of analytical work, while Twitter and microblogging services are better-suited for shorter messages in greater frequency. Although I’ve seen microblogging in the classroom, I wonder if its asking too much from students.
Not necessarily looking to displace other tools as ways of classroom communication but rather augment them, Twitter and Edmodo offer interesting possibilities. How can these tools for sharing basic knowledge and engaging in public discourse be integrated into pre-existing tools and computer-based strategies for teaching? The next step in my judgment is integration into courseware management tools like Blackboard, and even ScholarPress CourseWare.
Posted in Educational Computing, Twitter
I'm a digital humanist and graduate of American Studies, currently working as a web developer and