A professor at my undergraduate institution thinks Twitter is a great educational tool.
For W. Gardner Campbell, director of the Academy of Teaching and Learning at Baylor University, there is no question that fear of straying from the status quo has inhibited the development of Twitter as a teaching tool. “I go to conferences like Open Education 2009, and I come back with T-shirts like this: ‘Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute,’ ” he said Wednesday at the annual Educause conference here. “And all it adds up to is more punishment at the hands of well-meaning, sometimes, but ultimately self-preserving institutional structures.”
While some higher ed officials — including nearly everyone at Wednesday's debate between Campbell and Bruce Maas, CIO of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee — use Twitter for fun, many balk at the idea of incorporating it into the classroom.
Not Campbell, who also serves as an associate professor of literature and media at Baylor. “This network has been vitally important to me as a professional,” he told a packed audience, many of whom were discussing the session live via Twitter on a projection screen near the stage. Eventually, after he realized how useful the site is as a real-time resource for feedback and information, “I think, ‘If this network is good for me as a learner, could it be good for my students as learners?’ ”
Maas, representing a more sober view of Twitter’s educational utility, pointed to studies indicating that young people have not been as active in the realm of microblogging as their older counterparts. He said the evidence that the site might prove more a distraction in the classroom than a resource was right there in the room — Maas gestured to the overwhelming activity on the session’s Twitter discussion thread (the number of comments approached 500 by the end of the 45-minute gathering).
But Campbell had a different take on the implications of audience members feverishly typing away while a presentation is still in progress. “That’s a godsend!” he said. “Suddenly, I’m not just the one at the front just dispensing everything, and the students aren’t just sort of milling about doing their thing — we’ve actually got a team of people working together. And Twitter is the glue that holds the team together.”
So, Twitter gives you real time feedback on lectures and moves the discussion beyond the classroom, with a limit of 140 characters. I think Campbell might be overstating Twitter's contribution to education a little. I get real time feed back about my lectures by scanning the faces of the people in the class. I can do this without using my computer or cell phone to read people's tweets. A shy student might tweet a question they would not normally ask in class. But, if it's on a live stream everybody is going to know who asked it anyway so I do not see how that's going to put the shy student at ease. You might get more questions though, since there is only so much time in class. So, that's one benefit. But, still there are limitations. Often you have to go back and forth with a student several times to clarify what the are trying to ask in the first place. So, as an in-class tool, I do not see much benefit from Twitter.
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