Twitter in my 21st Century Classroom
/It took me forever to warm up to Twitter. Even though I’ve been online since GEnie was a thing, and I’m the type of guy who’s fluent in Star Trek: TNG and Stargate: SG-1, it failed to appeal to me. What bothered me was my perception that everyone used Twitter to report the most dull details of their lives (“chips are so good”) instead of interesting content. (Incidentally the thesis of my Instagram account is “food is so good”.) I used Twitter for years alongside Google Reader (RIP) for news from certain sources (Apartment Therapy, The New York Times), but when I recently became annoyed by how frequently certain stories would be pushed at me, I unfollowed several sources that I used to read on Twitter and relocated some of them to Facebook.
This semester in the context of teaching Communications and Writing for my paralegal students I have the chance to approach Twitter from a different angle. Having observed Twitter for a long long time, I finally understand that it has no single purpose, which isn’t all that different from other communication technologies like paper. You can use Twitter to share websites, coalesce activists, tell jokes, express feelings and relate minutiae. Paper is similarly useful since it can be used to record thoughts, embody promises, map places, stuff gift bags and make airplanes. Recognizing that there’s no single correct way to use Twitter has wonderfully quelled my anxieties about being a clumsy user.
In my classroom, Twitter helps me teach about technology and digital self-representation. It’s still early days in the semester, but we’ve already had a chance to turn our minds toward online privacy and conduct as well as linguistic innovations (btw hru tdy?). On the technical side of things, we’ve discussed how you can limit your audience and using hashtags (#MisheardLyrics).
If you would like to follow along this semester, you can investigate #PRLG722.
Photo by Beau Giles (CC BY)