Twitter in a learning context - the downside observed at ALT-C 2010.

Today I attended one the invited paper sessions at the ALT-C 2010 conference, that is on at Nottingham at the moment, as a "virtual" delegate. While not there, I observed something that I think is worth reporting and reflecting on.

I attended an invited session, which was being broadcast, via Elluminate, to the wider community. The first speaker was Dave White, of the Oxford University TALL project. He wowed the audience with his talk on distance learning and by giving away Pringles as rewards for audience participation. He was such a success in fact, that the audience (who for the most part where actually in the room*) twittered away continually right through the second speaker's presentation.

This was interesting because there are parallels to be made with (the lack of) student engagement in lectures. If this had been my lecture and my students had been tweeting (or more likely Facebooking) about last night rather than my lesson, I'd be shocked. Yet this audience of learning technologists and educational professionals, where quite happy to totally ignore Hans-Peter Baumeister's important concerns about the widening gap between how we think we should use technology with students and how students are using technology.

Now, admittedly, Hans-Peter could do with watching Chris Hall's "Is Powerpoint evil?" video, but even so, this seemed a bit out or order. After all, this was an invited speaker deemed by the ALT community (or at least their representatives on the conference organizing committee) to be worth listening to and learning from.

There were other issues as well. The slides for Dave's talk weren't being displayed for much of the talk. If you watch the recording (when it is made available) ... I assume that you'll see the same as I saw. Which is very little. Also, in general, the slides shown in Elluminate seem to lag behind the speaker.

Then there is the question of the suitability of Twitter as a back channel. It works well for those watching and engaged in the conversation at the time that it is happening. It is almost useless as a context-dependent archive. For example, Elluminate records the chat contributions when they happen: viewers of the recording will at least get to see the conversation as it happened and in context of what the speaker was saying and the visuals being shown. It will be almost impossible to marry the Twitter back channel to the recorded session.

I must return to the conference now as Sugata Mitra is about to give his keynote.

*I assume this because the external audience had to watch the talks in Elluminate and would need to switch context from chat to twitter to contribute.

Practical Advice for Teaching with Twitter

This interesting post from the Prof Hacker blog in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses how you might use Twitter in your teaching. The assumption is that students will be expected to contribute to an ongoing class discussion, which might not be how you'd want to do things, but for all that it contains useful advice. For example it compares the use of lists versus hashtags, frequency of tweeting, archiving the discussion, and displaying the results.

One idea from the US that I've seen in a couple of times now is the award of a part of the grade, say 10-20%, for class participation. Adoption of this idea might be a good way to encourage engagement with you modules. An alternative to using Twitter is the use of FriendFeed as a discussion channel. Alan Cann at Leicester uses this in a first-year course he gives on Personal Learning Environments. He calls it FriendFolios and sells it as a Facebook for uni.

Postscript

I have created a short collection of related articles on the use of Twitter in HE from ProfHacker and other sources. It's in my delicious collection tagged edutwitter. You can also use a new delicious feature to browse these bookmarks.

Twitter Community List

If you visit the Swansea Learning Lab blog regularly, you may have noticed the Learning Lab on Twitter feature at the right (if you are reading this in a Feed reader, please visit the live blog page now!). At the moment this shows the top 4 "tweets" posted by @swanlearninglab and it is generated from the RSS feed provided by Twitter.com.

Yesterday, a group of us (myself @cpjobling, Helen @HelenMD, and Julia @juliadesigns, where speculating about how to make this Twitter feed a bit more interesting. The basic problem is that only the person logged in as @swanlearninglab can post items to this feed, and although there is more than one of us with the privilege, there aren't enough to keep the feed active. What would be better, we thought, would be if we were tracking the people in the learning lab rather than the learning lab virtual person.

We looked into Tweetizen and considered setting up a group there, but it would have been limited to 10 users. We thought about using a hashtag #swanlearninglab, but that might require community training. So then, at Julia's suggestion, we looked into Twitter lists. And this looked like a possible way forward.

A Twitter list is a group of twitter users whose public tweets are followed as if they were a single person. We have set up a community list, called @swanlearninglab/community and added a few selected people to it. Having done this you can access the list directly at http://twitter.com/swanlearninglab/community and send messages to it by including @swanlearninglab/community in a tweet. Twitter also, helpfully, provides a widget that can be used to show the dynamic list:

Now all we need to do is replace the RSS feed by the widget and bob's your mother's brother. Instant community. Great if you tweet anyway but don't want to post a blog posting here.

If you want to be added to the list, just send a direct message to @swanlearninglab or add your twitter handle to the comments.

The Twitter Experiment: Using Twitter in lectures

Dr. Rankin, professor of History at University of Texas, Dallas, wanted to know how to reach more students and involve more people in class discussions both in and out of the classroom. She had heard of Twitter… She collaborated with the UT Dallas, Arts and Technology – Emerging Media and Communications (EMAC) http://www.emac.utdallas.edu faculty.

Welsh on Twitter

Daily Welsh Words on Twitter.

Swansea Learning Lab is now on Twitter!

In order to try and make Swansea Learning Lab a bit more dynamic, we have set up an account for the Learning Lab on Twitter.

If any of you are fellow twitterers, then please follow us @swanlearninglab or send messages to @swanlearninglab. We hope to tweet new tools, updates etc and will be focusing on a tool a day.

If you've never used twitter before, then go to http://twitter.com and sign up for an account. If you're not sure what twitter is and are too afraid to ask then why not check out the Twitter in Plain English video

To Tweet or not to Tweet

The BBC has reported on a Harvard study of the use of Twitter ("Twitter hype punctured by study", June 9, 2009). Here are some findings:

• "Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content"
• "more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days"
• "most people only ever "tweet" once during their lifetime"

I clearly tweet a little more than this. I have 74 updates and I last twittered today ... about ... Twitter.

Jon Stewart shakes his fist at Twitter

“It’s no wonder young people love it, according to reports about young people by middle-aged people.”

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Rise of Twitter

The BBC has an interesting comment on the rise of Twitter.

Twitter, the mobile phone-based micro-blogging service, rocketed nearly 1000% in use in the UK over the past year according to industry analysts HitWise.

And what are you doing right now?