Twitter comes to classrooms

By: Della Hasselle, The Chronicle Herald
March 13, 2010

Most students use Twitter to chat with friends about their weekends. Seventh-graders in a Montgomery County, Md., public school English class, however, used Twitter to write a book, collaborating with other students they never even met.

The idea came to the students’ language arts teacher George Mayo, 42, over lunch one day, when he tweeted the notion into cyberspace. Within moments, he got his first response, from a class in Canada. By the end of the week, the first 10 sentences were composed.

Within six weeks, Mayo and his student collaborators had published a book, Many Voices, written by more than 100 students in six countries, one 140-character sentence at a time.

Mayo and his students produced the final book on Lulu.com, a self-publishing site, complete with illustrations drawn to match the fantastic scenes about a girl turning into a mermaid. As a gesture to the service that gave them the idea, Mayo made sure that the science fiction book ended on the 140th tweet.

"It made the students think about what they wanted to say," said Mayo of the authors, who were from Canada, China, England and elsewhere. "It was a good exercise in creative writing. It took a lot of thinking about making sure each sentence is just right."

Many teachers are studying how to adapt social networking sites to academia rather than try to eliminate it from the classroom. They are finding places for Twitter in schools, both inside the classroom and for outside assignments. Students ranging from seventh-graders to those in doctoral programs are signing on.

Collaborative writing is a popular use for the networking tool, but it’s certainly not the only one. Teachers, professors and students from Quebec to Texas are using Twitter to follow conferences or news events, to manage class assignments, and to build a network of contacts for students to draw on when doing research.

Still, some teachers prefer to stick to the old-fashioned way. More traditional educators continue to bar the use of electronic devices — such as laptops and smart phones — in classrooms, citing them as distractions.

Twitter, which started in 2006, is a free social-networking and microblogging site that allows users to send messages to people who sign up to follow them. Each message, or tweet, can be only 140 characters long. While advocates say that the networking aspect of the service is invaluable, opponents claim that almost half of all tweets can be categorized as "pointless babble."

A 2009 Pew Internet and American Life survey found that younger people are becoming more interested in Twitter. Some 37 per cent of Twitter users are ages 18 to 24, an increase from 19 per cent in 2008. This shifts the demographic of Twitter users from those ages 25 to 34, who had been the largest group, to a much younger population.

The trend for younger people to flock toward Twitter is precisely the reason so many teachers are interested in using it. Paul Levinson, a professor of new media at Fordham University in New York, has made Twitter part of his curriculum.

"I study what impact it’s having on society," Levinson, 62, said. "The very first assignment was what importance did Twitter have on the surprisingly elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts?"

Levinson has his students follow current events and the news on Twitter to establish and study trends in politics, new media and TV. His students must get Twitter accounts and blog about popular subjects, like politics.

"It gives them a very good handle on how to interact with people much more important and famous than them," Levinson said.

By following and reaching out to people who would otherwise never respond to, say, a phone call, Levinson says, his students are put on a much more level playing field.

Chris Penny, a technology instructor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, also encourages the educators he instructs to teach their students how to follow important people using Twitter.

"One of my suggestions is to take a look at how you can use Twitter based on the class you will teach," Penny, 37, said. "For example, if you are teaching about the presidential election, you can follow who’s running for president."

By following them on Twitter, the students can see how the candidates promote their policies based on what they do and where they travel, Penny says.

Another way to use Twitter is to manage class assignments and responses to it. Paul R. Allison, a teacher at the East-West School of International Studies in New York, built his own site called Youth Twitter. On Youth Twitter, Allison says, students must post their work but can also socialize on a smaller network within the site called Youth Voices.

"There are two kinds of things this does," Allison said. "It allows students to have immediate personal connections. They don’t have to stop in the middle of class to say what they’re thinking now. They can just post it. It also encourages more revised, carefully written responses."

Students in Allison’s English class use Twitter in the middle of class, while he is lecturing, so that students may post their thoughts immediately and without interrupting the flow of class. Allison says it’s a good way to encourage all students to participate, especially those who might be too intimidated to raise their hand or find it tough to remember their comment while they wait their turn.

Twitter’s ability to encourage responses and initiate discussion is one of the main reasons so many teachers say they like using it.

Not everybody, however, believes that Twitter should be an integral part of the classroom. Vincent Atchity, dean of University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, is one academic who is against it.

"We do so much of our communicating these days with digits moving on keyboards that we risk losing the art of conversation entirely," said Atchity, 45.

Many details are lost in translation when using technology rather than having person-to-person interaction, Atchity said. These particulars include reactions on other people’s faces, listening to intonations, talking over each other in excitement and encouraging looks or thoughtful pauses.

"So … if this work … of paying live attention to one another is not taking place in our English and history (and other liberal arts) classrooms, where is it being done?" Atchity said.

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