Well, it took me a while to ‘get it,’ but I am finally set up, posting and understand the benefits of Twitter. I also understand just how much time it can eat up, and how pervasive it is. But fun? Totally! So, what do I see as the uses of this new (to me) media outlet? Well, ultimately, as this is not a ‘facebook’ type of social media, I think that posting status updates for students would be fair game. It seems easy enough to keep an account ‘professional’ at least from my end. I guess my big concern is whether is will be worth adding another branch of student communication. I did try to use twitter before in my classes, and it was not a great experience. This was mainly because the students weren’t twitter users, and I wasn’t comfortable enough with twitter to adequately guide the experience. I did set it up as a back-channel, but it wasn’t successful. In fact it was one of those experiences that began to guide my revision of how I was using technology in my classroom. I now ask myself how the students will benefit from the technology as opposed to completing the task a more ‘traditional’ way.
I do see some unbelievable benefits to Twitter for myself professionally, but I have to consider for my classes whether it might make more sense to use something like backnoise that has an inherent simplicity to it, or whether it is better to display a more ‘professional’ use of common social media to student in the form of Facebook or Twitter. Assuming the curricular benefits are the same, what are your thoughts?
