Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

“Do I Do It on My Phoooone?” The Twitter Post!

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Look, I get it. You’re a serious educator. And you have serious questions about Twitter.

(No, yeah. Click through that link. I’ll be here when you get back. Yep; it’s been taken down. Trust me though, it was hilarious.)

If you’re already rolling your eyes about the idea of using Twitter, then STOP! Yes, the name sounds silly, but I’m willing to bet that hasn’t been a deal-breaker for you concerning “Google.” This post is your chance to do your homework (I’m talking especially to you, reader with a research degree!), so that if you choose not to start using Twitter, then you can reject it like an adult. But I don’t think you will.

The signal-to-noise ratio on my Twitter feed is much higher than on my Facebook timeline. Why? Asymmetry. On Twitter, you follow whomever you want to follow. And, unlike Facebook, they do not have to follow you in return. Think about how wonderful that is. I can follow Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Twitter account, because I am interested in anything he wants to say ever; but Neil DeGrasse Tyson does not have to follow my tweets in return, and doesn’t, because why would he? Twitter’s asymmetrical way of handling follows allows you to fine-tune your feed to a marvelous degree. You think Twitter is about “what I had for breakfast”? Facebook is where I go to see cats and platitudes. Twitter is where I work.

What do I mostly see on my feed? I mostly see:

  • Educators linking to blog posts (or other projects) relating to pedagogy. This includes organizations like Wabash Center, THATCamp, and HāSTAC.
  • Biblical scholars linking to blog posts (or other projects) relating to Biblical Studies.
  • Professional colleagues and former students posting on whatever they’re paying attention to today.
  • A few accounts not related to my work (poetry, backpacking, science).
  • A handful of strangers who make me laugh really hard.

So: Where to begin?

Twitter for Beginners:

Twitter is just another username-and-password account, no big deal. There are endless places to learn to use Twitter. I like this one: “Five Things to Do as a New Twitter User”. If you don’t, Google it up and find one you do like.

Why to Tweet, and How:

I’ve said, above, part of my piece about why I tweet. I think one of the very best articles on “how and why” is this one by Anne Trubek. Ryan at ProfHacker gets a little nittier and grittier. Elsewhere, I make the case that nobody can tell you what any social media tool is for: you decide what the tool is for, and what it could be.

Academic/Professional Use of Twitter:

Carole McGranahan has a nice post on the general “Academic Benefits of Twitter”; don’t miss the links in her last paragraph.

My own most frequent course-related student use of Twitter is “Twitter Chats.” These are real-time events, usually an hour long, in which Twitter’s Search function is used to create a kind of Chat room; participants include in each of their posts an agreed-upon search term (a “hashtag,” like #edchat, by convention with that pound sign at the beginning). I write about Twitter chats here. (I also have a short online article forthcoming about using Twitter chats in course work, and will update this ’graph with a link when it’s available.) I have also used Twitter Chats in the physical classroom as a “back channel” for students to use during “Fishbowl Discussions.”

I was intrigued by how Lisa Halverson used Twitter with her high school students while they read Lord of the Flies: the students simply tweeted, asynchronously at random times, their own reactions and questions about the book as they read. It reminded me of geese honking to one another while flying in a “vee” formation, keeping one another’s spirits up.

Slightly controversial has been the use of Twitter to respond to conference presenters in real time, but still, the benefits of using of Twitter as a “backchannel” during profesional conferences are undeniable. (See you at #AARSBL! Or is it #SBLAAR?)

But Isn’t Twitter Killing the Art of Writing?

For my money, the fact that we can tell learners to “edit for brevity,” then turn around and exclaim that “nothing substantive can be accomplished in a brief format” says all that needs to be said on this question. Try this and get back to us.

Use the links above to get started and give it a try. Looking for someone to follow? Follow me, of course. See you on the Twitters. Let’s get to work.

Photo credit: “20120114-NodeXL-Twitter-myresearch network graph” by Marc Smith, under a CC BY 2.0 license

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Brooke Lester, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Hebrew Bible and Director for Emerging Pedagogies, at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston IL). He received his degree in Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

We are pleased that Brooke has agreed to serve as Seminarium’s curator, because – in his own words – I am an instructor who has “discovered” the scholarship of teaching and learning, and who talks about it with something of the fanaticism of the convert.

Brooke writes: There is a famous curse about being doomed to live “in exciting times,” and it’s not always fun to be living through the greatest upheaval in literacy since Gutenberg (or possibly since the dawn of writing), but, well…here we are!

My favorite thing about “digital learning” is that the stakes are in fact as high as we think they are: the digitization of language makes us talk together about how we really think learning happens, and then it makes us reconsider almost everything we think we know about that.

More insight into Brooke’s pedagogical “reconsiderings” can be found on his personal blog: http://www.anumma.com.