Learning and teaching with Twitter

I have presented a few workshops now on how to use Twitter as a learning and teaching tool. One of my most viewed blog posts with more than 10,000 hits is entitled Teaching with Twitter so there is a lot of interest in the topic. The question is, how can we harness the potential of this tool in a teaching and learning context? There has been a spectrum of reactions to the workshops I have presented, from the sceptical throught to the enthusiastic, and all of the questions that have been asked are valid and representative of the concerns and issues associated with using any informal tool in a formal context. One question often asked is: How do we use Twitter with children when we can't be sure how open Twitter is? What do we do about maintenance of confidentiality, privacy and the need to protect kids from internet predators? Another question relates to something I posted recently about why Twitter is so powerful. It relates to the need to persist with the tool so that you give it enough time to build up a critical mass of followers and followed, ensuring that your personal learning network (PLN) becomes effective. People have asked how effective Twitter is in developing a PLN, and a live tweetout usually shows them just how effective Twitter can be in connecting you to a world of knowledge, experts and resources. People ask, how much time is involved, and can they afford the time investment? Another concern is about age - some argue that Twitter is more the preserve of older people and that younger people tend to spurn the tool because it doesn't have the attractive affordances of other social networking tools such as Facebook. There is also the issue of instant gratification - how do younger people feel about having to invest in developing their network of followers/followed when it patently takes a lot of effort and time? I'm sure you have a view or two on these issues, and I invite you to post your comments here for others to engage with. In the meantime, here's the slideshow I used at a recent workshop on Teaching with Twitter at the Ulearn Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Teaching and Learning with Twitter

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Learning and teaching with Twitter by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.