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.
Teaching four courses this semester, rather than my usual two, has presented new challenges in managing my time. Among other things, my usual approach of trying to schedule meetings with students during standing office hours has broken down. With 650 undergraduates and 20 graduate students enrolled in my courses — not to mention my own grad students — I spend almost as much time trying to schedule meetings with students as I do actually meeting with them.