The World A.T. Ways

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on March 17, 2009

I spent November 5th, election night in the United States, with about a thousand people. I wasn’t downtown in some large convention hall with a group of my friends. In fact, I had never met any of these folks before that night. They hailed from all over the world and the one thing that connected us was a common desire to share this momentous event together. And that we did, using  Current TV and Twitter. So while watching Current TV broadcast its own election coverage live on its site, I also could read what people all over the world had to say about the election, the candidates, their platforms, what was going on at their location and more. I also was watching the major news stations cover the election on my television and at some point in the evening, I turned off my T.V. because I realized this Current TV and Twitter mashup was giving me a much better sense of the mood and activities of the voters and observers worldwide as it was happening than the network news commentators could.

Now all politics aside, why should we language educators concern ourselves with something that, according to some, has jumped the shark?

Before we give you our reasons why we think you should twitter, let’s briefly describe what it does. As Kevin explained in a previous post, Twitter allows you to broadcast your news in short, concise statements of no more than 140 characters. That includes spaces and punctuation, making brevity a virtue. It’s similar to your status message on Facebook. Thus, Twitter, as originally conceived, was a very simple way to broadcast messages to a group of people. It’s simplicity is it’s great strength, as users create new ways to use Twitter and programmers create unique applications that allow those users to interact with the Twitter community in ways that no one individual alone could imagine. It was through Twitter that local residents received up-to-the-minute, critical information on the wildfires consuming large swaths of San Diego in the fall of 2007, how the world first learned of the devastating earthquakes in China in May 2008, and the way citizens frantically provided on-the-scene updates to their Twitter network as the Mumbai tragedy unfolded in November 2008.

I would argue then, that Twitter and similar communication mediums are not trivial at all and as with any tool or material, it is up to us to determine how and when we use them.

So how could you use Twitter? Well, you could use Twitter

1. to share your knowledge and learn from others as Sherry Amorocho describes in Four magic bytes. Joe Dale has a great post about the power of Twitter when used as part of your personal learning network.
2. to aggregate real-time data that out-performs Google for live event coverage and for tapping into the conversations and ideas of people all over the world. This is a great way to integrate interdisciplinary content into your curriculum.
3. to maximize your conference experience. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if conference attendees could easily access constantly updated information on great (and not so great) sessions, session cancellations and moved venues, find out the best spots to eat and greet, and virtually engage in some of those terrific, spontaneous hallway discussions that so often happen at conferences? With Twitter, hashtags and a laptop or mobile phone, you can. And our colleagues who couldn’t attend could still get something out of following these conversations online.
4. to use as a back channel during class as a way to more fully engage students as Ira Socol did with his undergraduates. Assuredly very controversial, but very intriguing and worthy of further exploration.
5. to record (concisely) your impressions of recent conversations, readings or experiences. Twitter archives all your ‘tweets’ and since each message is short, I find it incredibly useful to be able to go back and look at this abbreviated and hyperlinked diary of mine. Twitter also lets you ‘favorite’ messages, yours and others, and stores them for you in your favorites section for easy reference. Even better, I can check out other Twitterer’s favorites, too.



6. to send quick, easy travel updates with pictures, if you want. This is a nice way to share your experiences with your students and if you are traveling with students, a great way for your group to share their trip with friends and family.
7. to give your students the chance to practice their language and intercultural skills with native speakers as Enza Antenos-Conforti’s students in the U.S. are doing with Seth Dickens’ students in Italy.

So how do you get started?

1. If you’re new to Twitter, take a look at Liz Davis’ Getting Started with Twitter screencast which not only does a great job guiding you through the initial steps of how to set up and use Twitter, but also gives several examples of ways to use Twitter as an educator.
2. Shelley Krause’s Twitter Newbies FAQ wiki has loads of information that is not just for beginners. It’s organized in such a way that you can check out what interests you now and then come back later when you want to move up to the next level.
3. Kate Klingensmith’s post, A Teacher’s Guide to Twitter, provides some more information and additional resources. Be sure to check out the comments as well!
4. Rodd Lucier has just started Twitter for Teachers: A Collaborate Effort to Teach Teachers About Twitter that looks to be quite promising.
5. If you need some ideas for how you might use Twitter with your students, Tom Barrett shares Nineteen Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom
6. And finally, you can see all our bookmarks for Twitter on our worldatways Diigo group. If you join our group and share relevant websites here, we can all benefit from our collective discoveries.

Want to connect with other language educators?

1. Look at twitter4teachers’ Foreign Language Teachers section —and once you’ve joined Twitter make sure to add your name to this list.
2. Check out Kevin and Barbara to see our Twitter community. It’s an easy way to discover and start following your own favorite Tweeters.

What did we miss? Let us know by sharing them here or by sending us a “tweet”.

In which the whole world is all atwitter by Barbara Lindsey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.worldatways.com/suggest-topics/.

Categories: Teaching and Learning, Twitter feeds, social networks, web 2.0
Tags: Barbara, social networking, twitter, web 2.0