While I am not a personal fan of Twitter, I can definitely see the appeal. According to Twitter, Twitter is “a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers.”
Common Craft gives an excellent video on explaining what Twitter is.
As a future educator, I am always interested in how new technology can be implemented into the classroom. Several programs have been enacted to incorporate Twitter into more and more classrooms. According to Wikipedia:
The Distance College of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, used Twitter with native Chinese students as a tool to train communicative and cultural competence. Students had to post a certain number of English tweets and react to the tweets of their fellow students. Twitter was viewed as a supplement to practice in authentic environment different aspects of the target language as it was taught in the classroom.
The University of Vienna, Austria, used Twitter as an evaluation platform for student ratings. Every student had to send a tweet after each course unit with feedback to the teacher. Twitter turned out to be "a useful tool for evaluating a course formatively. Because of Twitter's simple use and the electronic handling of data, the administrative effort remains small."
At the University of Texas at Dallas, Twitter has been incorporated into the actual classroom setting of History courses with big groups of students. This innovative approach gives more students the opportunity to express their views in class discussions. Another advantage of this approach is that the limit of characters forces them to get to the central point.
According to telegraph.co.uk, Twitter is put on the new primary school curriculum. Children should be able to "organize and adjust" speaking and writing skills depending on the technology being used, including using "emails, messaging, wikis and twitters". During the primary years, children should also be taught to speak, write and broadcast using "blogs, podcasts, websites, email [and] video".
Obviously, Twitter is taking hold to the current culture, but how far will it go. I personally don’t care what people are eating, drinking, doing… It’s pretty irrelevant to me. But obviously, not to everyone! Tweet on!
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