Twitter and Higher Education

May 17, 2010 2 minutes read

author: dparry711 date: 2010-05-17 15:29:31+00:00 draft: false title: Twitter and Higher Education type: post url: /2010/05/17/twitter-and-higher-education/ categories: - Research

Writings ———-

Relatively early in the Twitter hype curve I started using Twitter in one of my classes. At the time I was teaching a course on “Computer Mediated Communication” and thus it seemed like a good time to experiment with this “new craze.” After the semester I wrote a post to my blog talking about how I used, why I used it, and its effects on classroom dynamics. For whatever reason this garnered a significant amount of attention, leading to an article in The Chronicle, and various other higher education publications. Some of this is already fairly dated. But regardless it is now clear there were three big winners in the Web 2.0 transformation: Google, Facebook, and Twitter. This could certainly change, but for now I think it is roughly true and thus all three of these are worth significant serious study. For a host of reasons I find Twitter to be the most interesting. Here is a list of some of the Twitter and Higher Education pieces:

  * ["Twitter for Academia" ](http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/)(This is the original Academhack post.)
  * ["Micro-Blogging Part Deux"](http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/micro-blogging-part-deux/) (Follow up to the original post.)
  * ["Forget Email: New Messaging Service has Professors Atwitter."](http://chronicle.com/article/Forget-E-Mail-New-Messagin/17813/) (Piece at _The Chronicle_)
  * ["Micro-Blogging with Twitter."](http://campustechnology.com/articles/2008/03/micro-blogging-with-twitter.aspx) (Interview at Campus Technology)
  * ["Twitter at the MLA."](http://www.hastac.org/node/1876) (Piece at HASTAC on the 2008 MLA panel on Twitter.)
  * ["The Twitter Experiment."](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8&feature=player_embedded) (This isn't my work. Rather it is by a colleague, Monica Rankin, here at UT-Dallas, and an EMAC student Kim Smith. This video documents Monica's use of Twitter in the classroom.)