Presentation: Twitter is Dead (really?)
I was not privileged enough to be able to attend this years eLearning Conference at the University of Plymouth, but have been following some of the conversations and sessions on Twitter thanks to the #pelc10 hashtag.
One presentation that really caught my eye is the ‘Twitter is Dead‘ from Tony McNeill. While it may have been the title that (shocked) interested me, the content is far more interesting – Tony shows the results of his activities with students who were asked to use Twitter for an element of their classroom activities.
Tony uses the tag line of ‘Reflections on student resistance to microblogging’ for the presentation, and that is what it is, reflection. It doesn’t constitute ‘research’ but it wouldn’t be too far to stretch the imagination that a full research paper on this would come up with very similar results.
Twitter Is Dead – View more presentations from Tony McNeill.
The interesting points, where the results are really put into perspective, are from about slide 41 onwards; the positive and negative views from the students on it’s merit as well as it’s failures.
I like the presentation, and think there is much that we, as educators and facilitators, can take from Tony’s ‘reflections’ with a view to working Twitter into the classroom activities and make it more mainstream.
Obviously, Twitter is not dead (yet) but to make sure this doesn’t happen is partly our responsibility; to ensure it is used appropriately with our students, and not just for the sake of integrating a fashionable technology.
What do you think?
Get the impression from the slides that students felt Twitter being used for the sake of it. I think it is great that Tony are trying stuff out like this – we need to know whether it can contribute to learning – but we must be careful not to use technology for its own sake or to try and integrate things just because they are “popular”. (Though, clearly, Twitter wasn’t popular among Tony’s cohort.)
There are other microblogging tools that form a closed environment without the celebrity culture overtones that students perceive from Twitter and without intruding on the social networks that they don’t want to use for learning. Perhaps we should be looking more at them, or other collaborative tools to try and deliver the same learning gains?
Presentation and purpose is all. Having said that, we are having more success with student use of friendfeed this year than with twitter last year. Facebook is a social space for most students, it just isn’t an option for serious instruction.
I’m not there either, but I really liked this presentation. I am perhaps in the minority in thinking that the way to help students develop PLEs is to expose them to the tools, and help them to understand the benefits by modelling good use. @daveowhite’s makes the point here http://prezi.com/x0nxciep_mlt/visitorresident/ that motivation and culture are all important. We are not going to change the culture or encourage intrinsic motivation by forcing students to use tools. They have to determine the meaning of the tools for themselves.
If we want to show students how Twitter is useful let us do it by demonstrating how we find it useful.
Twitter is a different fish that’s for sure. The short blog notes work for business but truely not so for the average person. Twitter has bugs or problems in it’s simplest functionality as well. For instance we are unable to change the background to our company website background, all recent attempts to post a blog comment have also failed to post. So when a product doesn’t function nearly ecverytime you go to use it. That makes the product a DEAD PRODUCT, doesn’t it?