The use of Twitter in an academic context
And here I thought I was going to beat everyone by THIS MUCH to write about how to use Twitter 
in an academic context and… guess what? Somebody beat me to it. Yes, the blog “AcademHack” wrote about the usefulness of Twitter in the classroom, and funny how it goes, I found about it on the January 28th, 2008 issue of Wired Campus (in The Chronicle of Higher Education). Given that I am an educator (mostly third/fourth year university undergraduates but I’ve also taught at the Masters and PhD levels), I always find it funny when something I use for fun is deemed valuable in my own professional context.
The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve realized that even those established newsletters like The Chronicle of Higher Education have actually been blogs all along. Well-researched, meaningful blogs, but blogs nonetheless. Their short columns are widely read, online, time-stamped, although one element is not present there that is totally Web 2.0: the bi-directionality. Mostly, The Chronicle’s articles are just written by the author, posted and there is no bi-directional interaction between author and reader.
When I think about Twitter and its use in academia, I often had wondered how I’d react to students of mine tweeting back and forth at me. Given that I didn’t feel comfortable with my students “friending me” on Facebook (and hence one of the key reasons why I don’t use it) I thought I wouldn’t be comfortable with Twitter and my students. However, one of my former students (and one of the best, I might add) has recently joined Twitter, and while we don’t follow each other on my personal account, I had a chance to chat with him in person recently and we talked about the microblogging tool.
Right now, I kind of wish that my students were on Twitter. We could keep in touch (although some people say that that’s exactly what Facebook is for), but I can also see the potential value in the classroom for interacting with the professor, particularly in a remote location (distance education) and when the student is particularly shy (he/she could send me a DM and answer a particular question).
Those of you who have used Twitter and are academics/educators/teachers, how else would you use Twitter in the classroom?
Related posts:
Being worried about students friending you on Facebook is one of the key reasons you don’t use it? Why don’t you just not accept their friend invites, telling the class that this is your policy? Problem solved. There you go – now you can join FB!
And I might suggest setting up a twitter account for your teaching and mainly keep it separate from you personal account. That way you can do both.