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TWITTERING ON
It’s now a firmly-entrenched – and dearly-held - notion that ‘kids today ain’t what they used to be’. With Mark Prensky creating a new digital divide of ‘natives’ and ‘immigrants’ and school teachers complaining endlessly that their kids have the attention span of a goldfish, we’re led to believe that there’s not much point engaging in any serious teaching as they’ll all be on their mobile phones before we’ve dusted off our Complete Works of William Shakespeare and cracked open a fresh box of chalk.
Sometimes, however, it helps to look at the ‘problem’ from another angle – or perhaps even embrace the notion that it isn’t a problem at all, really – possibly an opportunity. A colleague’s daughter (native, eleven years old) can regularly be seen coming home from school and then performing the following tasks:
- Sign in to Messenger to talk to schoolmates last seen ten minutes previously
- Open blog to write new posting, usually directed at schoolmates last seen…
- Post photos for schoolmates
- Send messages to schoolmates via SMS on her mobile
- Look at homework in boring old-style ‘book’
- Listen to music in laptop
So, you see, she’s pretty busy working on a variety of things, with a variety of media. In fact, I’d say her attention span is quite good, since she can do all these things for hours without getting bored! What’s more, she can effectively juggle all these activities whilst shouting up the stairs for some sustenance.
So, it seems, ‘natives’ have endless patience for technology, and can work with all different manifestations of it at the same time. Far from being unproductive, they’re amazingly achieving. The issue for us as teachers is that we tend to get stuck on the details (using a book for the whole class, for example) when we need a bigger, wider, more eclectic picture to engage our learners.
One of the tools we’ve become particularly fond of is Twitter– a tool which allows for ‘microblogging’, or blog posts which can be no longer than a normal mobile phone SMS. This is a simple idea (so simple that a lot of people just can’t get their heads around it) which takes the SMS and turns it into an online writing, sharing, community tool. Here’s how it works:
As a Twitter member you can:
- post short messages about what you’re doing, etc.
- follow the short messages of other people (like subscribing)
- be followed by other people
When you post a new message, anyone ‘following’ you gets an update from you. Similarly, when someone you are following posts an update, you get that on your Twitter page. Essentially what you have is a shifting community of correspondents who interact with each other via short messages.
You can read these updates on your personalised Twitter page, have them sent to your mobile phone, or use specialised software such as Firefox plugins (see Twitter Resources below) or dedicated Windows or Mac applications to manage your Twitter life.
So what’s this got to do with teaching, training or professional development? This newsletter is too short to consider the areas in any detail, but why not start with teaching by checking out the excellent suggestions in the article ‘Twitter for Academia’ by Dave Parry (see Twitter Resources below)?
And when you’re done with that, why not investigate the community and teacher development aspect of Twitter by taking a look at the excellent Webheads Crowdstatus page which brings together lots of the Webheads at:
http://crowdstatus.com/webheadsinactioncrowd.aspx?
By now you should be able to see some of the possibilities of engaging your learners with something so creative – and so undemanding on their time.
There is, however, another question which often comes up with these new technologies, and that is the area of impinging on their world, or appropriating ‘their’ technologies for ‘our’ teaching purposes. When adopting these approaches we need to ensure that we don’t oversell them as something new we’ve found (we don’t want to end up at the party like the middle-aged man in tight jeans dancing badly to the latest music!) – perhaps try dropping it in in a more casual way… “I found a really interesting website on Twitter the other day”, and see if someone bites – before you know it you’ll have a myriad of class Crowdstatus pages and you’ll be multi-tasking like a teenager!
Twitter Resources
