Twitter in the classroom?
Posted by Lance Gravlee on August 15th, 2009 in Teaching | 5 Comments »
Until a couple of weeks ago, I never thought I would be interested in Twitter. And I sure didn’t think the microblogging service—with its 140-character limit on posts, or “tweets”—offered much as a teaching tool. But a growing number of success stories from higher education have me thinking about how to incorporate Twitter into my courses.
I started thinking about teaching with Twitter thanks to David Parry, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of the blog, academHacK. Parry wrote a series of excellent posts about using Twitter in academia. Then the Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffington Post, and U.S. News & World Report featured other proponents of using Twitter in the classroom. I am particularly intrigued by how Monica Rankin used Twitter to offset the limitations of traditional lectures in large classes—something I have to worry about in my 700-student course on human sexuality and culture.
It’s really the 700-student part that has me interested in Twitter. Most professors recognize that lectures are not the best way for students to learn—they turn students into passive recipients rather than active participants. The effective use of technology, however, has the potential to make even large lecture classes more engaging. I couldn’t imagine teaching the human sexuality course without classroom clickers, for example. Being able to poll students about their attitudes and behaviors and then display the results in real-time opens up a level of in-class discussion that isn’t usually possible in a large lecture hall. The course blog also gives students another way to discuss the course material and make connections to current events. I wonder if Twitter could likewise enhance the course by giving students another way to engage the material.
I have two key goals for adding Twitter to ANT 2301. I’m hoping professors and teachers who have used Twitter successfully might be able to offer advice about the best way to set it up.
Goal 1: Promote more in-class discussion
Classroom clickers have been very effective in helping to stimulate in-class discussion. When we discuss same-sex marriage or abortion, for example, I can poll students about their attitudes and immediately display a chart showing the distribution of their responses. Or I can display gender differences in the students’ self-reported sexual behaviors. It’s then easy to roam the aisles and hand the microphone to students who want to discuss their views or react to pattern of responses. But not everyone is comfortable with the mic. And occasionally there are too many students who want to chime in. With a pool of 700 students, it’s not possible to give everyone a chance to speak. Could Twitter help solve this problem?
Goal 2: Relate course material to real life
One great thing about teaching Human Sexuality and Culture is that it takes little effort to keep students interested in the topic. For better or worse, students probably spend more free time thinking about my class than they do about physics or English literature. The challenge is to get them to think critically and apply the concepts we introduce in class to their understanding of current events and everyday life. The blog helps because the TAs—all nine of them—and I can post our thoughts about the day’s news and how it connects to the course. There are two big limitations, though. First, the TAs and I never have enough time to write about all the stories that catch our eye. Second, although students can comment on posts we write, they can’t write their own posts if they want to share a story or discuss something I raised in class. The short format of Twitter makes it more likely I would share links to relevant stories, and the fact that it’s public means students can contribute as much as they want.
Nuts and bolts
I am reasonably confident that Twitter could help meet these two goals. But I’m less sure about how best to set it up. Here are some specific issues I’m thinking about:
- A separate class account? Dave Parry and Monica Rankin recommend setting up a separate twitter account for each class you teach. But that recommendation seems to be based on the assumption that you will follow all your students (and they will follow you). As Parry says, it’s easy enough to add all your students manually if you have 20 or 30. But if you have almost 700…?
- Track course content with hashtags? Twitter users can identify keywords called hashtags by adding the “#” symbol to the beginning of a word. Rankin used hashtags to identify the topic for each week in her U.S. history class. As an alternative to having a separate class account on Twitter, would it work just to add #ant2301 to any tweet related to class?
- Managing Twitter in class. In her Twitter experiment, Rankin devoted one class period per week to Twitter discussions. She put students in groups of two or three and had them tweet about the most important ideas or questions their group was discussing. She displayed the running Twitter conversation on the screen at the front of the lecture hall. In her class of 90, the chaos was manageable, but I’m afraid it would be overwhelming with seven times that many students. How can I incorporate Twitter discussion in class? One option I’ve considered is to have TAs monitor Twitter and respond directly or let me know about any discussion on Twitter that needs my attention during class.
- Ethical issues. One of Twitter’s advantages is that it’s public, but for some classroom discussions that could also be a disadvantage. Given the sensitive and politically charged issues we discuss in class, it would be important for students to understand the public nature of their tweets. There’s also a certain risk in opening up the discussion in a way that people don’t have to take direct responsibility for their comments. I already had a student utter hate speech on the microphone; what would happen on Twitter? Would it be better to consider a closed alternative like Edmodo?
If you have answers to any of these questions—or if you have other questions I haven’t thought of—I’d love to hear it. Please leave a comment below.
Update, 8/18: Based on Dave’s suggestion below, my tweets for the class are now @ant2301.
5 Responses
I am not familiar with how Twitter is set up, but here’s an idea. How about setting up Twitter “communities” within your class? The “communities” are like suburbs of a city (your class of 700). Each Twitter “community” could set up its structure for interacting in the class and for holding “town hall meetings” (the group discussions on topics). The group could even select (and rotate membership of) a community council to call meetings of interest to the community. These town hall meetings are for hot topics needing the “community’s” attentioin. For manageability, TAs could monitor communities of 100 students (depending on how many TAs you have).
If there are 7 “communities,” the communities at different times can meet on Twitter to discuss key issues and perspectives associated with class topics.
Just a little brainstorming. I look forward to hearing how your Twitter classroom experience works out.
Cheers,
Bridgett
I have never used it for a large class, so Monica is probably the person best equipped to give you feedback on this but for what it is worth here are my thoughts:
-Definitely have TAs monitor, moderate it during class, as they can actually get a sense of what students are having trouble with. Also students being aware that the TAs will/are monitoring probably increases the quality of tweet.
-I think Twitter operates totally different from clickers in the classroom think of it as the qualitative feedback to the quantative feedback of clickers.
-Relating course material. Don’t worry about it, not everyone will see everything, but that’s the nature of Twitter. Not necessarily for long format discussions, but to point to places where the long format takes place. Try pointing students to a blog post on which they can comment. Plus you and the TAs don’t have to comment/tweet about everything you find interesting, if done right the students will do this as well and further build the “cloud” of information.
-Forget following everyone. Just set up an official account for the class, make sure everyone follows it. The account doesn’t have to follow everyone. They would all then get any @replies directed at the account, and teach them to use hashtags. Also get a Twitter client for you and your TAs that handles mutliple accounts, that way you can each have your own personal ones but easily switch to the class one.
-Monica broadcasted the feed, at times at least, behind her. I am not sure how productive this is, or perhpas how distracting.
-Forget ethics, students have to learn to be public with their knowledge, it is a necessary skill to learn if they are going to succeed. They need to learn how to participate in the public network while maintaining their own level of “privacy.” This might mean that they block their stream from the public, tweet under an alias or whatever, but go open or go home, closed networks like edmodo are only useful in the k-12 context where there are serious legal restrictions.
@Bridgett: That’s an interesting idea. I see a parallel between your suggestion about communities and the small groups Monica Rankin set up in class. Her students would post the most interesting ideas and questions from each group to Twitter. But it also seems to me that the potential value of Twitter is the cross-cutting communication, so that people can follow the conversation in other small groups (or communities).
@Dave: Thanks for your very helpful suggestions. The TAs are on board, so we’ll give it a shot. I’m eager to see how the clickers and Twitter work together in class (or not).
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Your biggest challenge/issue seems to be that you are trying to engage 700 students in a productive setting. My experience with 90 students was that such a large group can become chaotic very quickly. And it becomes difficult to manage so many tweets if they are all posting simultaneously. I like the idea of setting up smaller “communities” – I would think that 90-100 students is about the maximum that you would want to work with in a given community. You might assign each community a different topic for discussion but allow everyone to follow each community’s tweets.
If you want to follow all of the students, then I definitely recommend setting up a separate account. But that might not be necessary if you use hashtags to track topics.
Regarding projecting the feed – if all students have access to a computer in the classroom, this will not be necessary. But if you have students using cell phones to tweet, you should consider projecting the feed. For my class, the projected feed was the only access many students had to the real-time tweets.
Regarding privacy, my administration suggested I make the twitter participation “optional” and give students a way to contribute to discussions without posting public comments. Allowing them to block their stream may accomplish this – but check with your administration.