Twitter? As a resource?

Having finished the reading for today, I must say I found the cheating blog very interesting. I remember the issues that my professors had with cheating on multiple choice tests and the crazy lengths they went to in order to prevent it. (Three separate versions, sitting at least two seats apart front to back and sideways and multiple testing dates.) The personal account of the Media 21 project was very cool, I would definitely be on board with a similar class experiment to draw out reluctant researchers and inspire kids to use non-traditional methods to find information. Viewing the internet and technology as a resource instead of as entertainment is such an underused concept, I look forward to encouraging students to explore the utility of new technology.

Alright, so I was all set and onboard with Google and Wikipedia being used as educational resources, but Twitter? I'm not sure I'm willing to cross that bridge yet. I'll stare into the chasm of social media for a bit longer if you don't mind. (Next they'll be telling us there's merit in MySpace.)

Perhaps it's a mark of my own experiences with Twitter, which I do in fact use, but I find it difficult to fathom its uses in education. It took me about a year after finding out about it to get onto Twitter and my account was suspended immediately because several accounts were created from the same ISP on that day and Twitter suspected spamming. So for a month after the day I created it, I wasn't able to use my account. Needless to say, I found this irritating and once they reactivated me I still didn't use it for a little while out of spite.

Honestly, I tend to use Twitter to say mundane things that I find funny. Rarely do I use it for profundity, and not enough people follow me for me to want to make it worthwhile. It's a whole lot of SOCs on the screen. (Stream of consciousness) The only time that I feel I used it well was when I went on vacation and used my phone to upload pictures to Twitter as I took them. That way I didn't have to share my pics with anyone when I got back or post them into a Facebook album, they were already available online.

The other thing I use Twitter for is to keep up on my favorite geek celebrities and authors who often post exclusive updates about when and where they'll be touring. I get reminders from artists I follow that they're going to be at local conventions or releasing new work, like Randy Milholland being in Troy, MI last May and Felicia Day's "Guild behind the scenes" notes. (If you don't know who they are, that's okay, I probably don't know who some of your celebrities are either.)

So in this assessment of what and why I use Twitter myself, I realize that I've never once considered the serious applications of Twitter. I know it is used as a marketing tool because I get spammed by bots and advertisers about things I don't care about. I can see it being useful for educators to follow their favorite edublogger or researcher, but I still have difficulty seeing how it can be used in the classroom itself.

More on life later,
~Ren