Twitter: Yes, but, how can you teach with that?

Twitter is the top teaching tool of 2009, according to Jane Hart's "Top 100 eLearning tools of 2009" list, available in draft on her website. Powerpoint languishes at number 9. The list is drawn from a poll of learning technologists, and is classic example of what Bud Hunt, and others, call Bright Shiny Object Syndrome - a passion for the newest, shiniest tool as a panacea for all ills.

[If, like many people, you have only just heard of Twitter and don't have a sense of what it does, I'll again direct you to Commoncraft - Twitter in Plain English]

In terms of technology adoption, I'm unrepentantly in the early majority. I like to see others prove the technology and find a usage model that works, before leaping in to try it or advocate it myself. Twitter, for teaching, isn't at that stage yet. I haven't seen a usage model for Twitter as a teaching tool that is compelling and makes use of what Twitter can do, over an above the effect that any new trick or tool might have to perk up a classes interest for a while.

There are compelling uses for Twitter beyond the purely social. I use it as a straight information dissemination channel (@ionadbairre) for events at work and others, for example @GrahamAttwell use it well as tool to spread their ideas, a personal marketing tool in effect (and nothing wrong with that). There is an interesting application for it as a sort of topic themed chat facility. For example, people tweeting from the recent EdTech conference tagged their tweets with a #EdTech09 keyword, so by searching on that you could get a sense of the buzz of activity about the conference. There is real value there. Some people use this dynamically in a presentation as a discussion or conference backchannel.

In teaching a compelling usage mode has not yet emerged, and I have my doubts if it will. There are some good efforts out there on the web. David Parry, of University of Texas, has a nice video of his usage of Twitter to connect to his students in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He makes the case for using it as a tool to keep engaged with his students, rather than a teaching tool in a strict sense. French Today, a language learning website, makes use of it as forum for discussion of vocabulary. This presentation by Tom Barrett "Twenty Five interesting ways to use Twitter in the classroom" summarises some other approaches, as does Steve Wheeler of the University of Plymouth on his blog. Steve has some great links to other resources on teaching with Twitter. Some of them have potential, such as the 'Lingua Tweeta' approach for languages.

Another place Twitter might come into play in in contexts where phones are abundant but computers and broadband are scarce. I suspect the compelling usage models of Twitter in teaching won't come from a JISC funded study, but from a school in Nairobi, or Lagos, where mobile phone penetration is going to be orders of higher than networks PCs for some time. Through it's SMS linkages, Twitter could allow them to do things we might do with a heavier tool like our Virtual Learning Environment or eMail systems.

One other barrier to consider for adoption of Twitter in a core teaching activity is you need to get everyone in class using it. David Parry notes that only half his students use it. Shifting everyone on to Twitter to carry out any kind of core teaching exercise is going to be difficult. You would need a really compelling reason to try. My advice on Twitter is, sure, check it out if you have the time by all means, but I don't think it is ready for your classroom yet.

Prove me wrong!