Tweeting in the back row

I came across this article today, which speaks to a number of the topics we have discussed in various conversations this year. The article is "College professors find Twitter a useful educational tool" from the Wichita Eagle newspaper. In typical "news" style, the article does not go into much depth, but there are a couple of lines that will ring familiar to many of us.

Others say experimentation with Twitter is the latest sign of a real shift in education, away from a professor lecturing students to a more democratic and wide-ranging exchange of information.
...
That means, of course, that students can also tweet from class, potentially broadcasting a professor's comments across the globe.

"It's something I've learned to accept, but it's hard," said David Kamerer of Wichita, assistant professor of public relations and new media at Loyola University Chicago.

"They might be IM'ing or on Twitter, commenting on the lecture, and I have no way of knowing," he said. "It's a little unnerving, but slowly it has become an accepted part of academia."

The other concern raised is about student attention.

In a perfect world, I'm sure that lecturing professors would prefer to have 100% of student attention.* But since we do not live in a perfect world, which is more preferable to this same lecturing professor--to have students falling asleep in the back row or to have students engaged enough to "tweet out" the salient points of the lecture and/or to find and broadcast information related to topic being presented?

A couple of years ago, I assisted a team-taught course that discussed related issues in three national cultures. The faculty members prepared their lecture notes and the links and visual materials to support the lectures, which they put up in Blackboard, but invariably questions or topics would arise in class (from students and professors) that were outside of the prepared materials. That's where I came in. 

Officially, I was in the class to ensure technology worked, to add my comments (since my field overlapped), and to help "control" the Blackboard links and visuals. What I ended up doing, though, was more interesting. I was actively Googling things that would come up and, when appropriate, signal the professor. My search results could then be shown to the class. It worked beautifully, and allowed for a much richer classroom experience. Unfortunately, it was definitely not scaleable campus-wide. There was only one of me, after all. Nor was it reasonable to expect that a professor would want to actively derail the conversation in order to perform Internet searches constantly during the class. The hemming and hawing during a search at the podium is uncomfortable and a time waster, and student attention will wander. This is where I see opportunity for tools like Twitter.

For students who are comfortable multi-tasking, the tweets in the back channel can provide an enhanced conversation, links to related content, and feedback on the course. If the Twitter-stream is docked somewhere on the instructor's station in the room, then particularly interesting or useful tweets can then be brought to the foreground of the class discussion for comment and analysis. 

Contrast that with the value of the notebook doodles of bored students or the dreams of the dozers! I think I'd prefer the tweets.

*Of course, in a perfect world, many of us would probably prefer not to have professors who merely lecture, either.

Comments

[Joshua Kim]

Anthony....I just love that image of you Googling away in the classroom:

"I was actively Googling things that would come up and, when appropriate, signal the professor. My search results could then be shown to the class. It worked beautifully, and allowed for a much richer classroom experience."

Why isn't this scalable to having all the students do this?

Or having a break after 15 minutes where students need to Google something related to what topic is being covered and then "add value" for the rest of the class?

This would be a great opportunity to both get the students involved, and also have a discussion about what makes up credible sources and information.

Come to think about it, the role you were playing requires significant skill in both the discipline and in research - and is probably something we should think about how to teach.

Great post.

[Anthony Helm]

Josh,

What isn't scaleable is having a full-time content-savvy employee present in every classroom to assist the faculty member. My point is that Twitter DOES provide a way to make this scaleable by handing it over to the students. But you are right, I think this is something that students have to learn or be taught how to do and to do well.

[Brian Reid]

I could see having one or two students being specifically responsible for coordinating the internet connections during a class session. They could prepare ahead of time to be the expert Google-meister (Anthony's role in the course he helped teach) or a tweet interpreter/collator. That role could rotate.