Twitter?? Faculty "invasion"? What do you think is appropriate?

The following is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education online newsletter:


More on Academic Twittering: Breaking Down the Classroom Walls

We've had plenty of interest in our coverage of Twitter (and other micro-blogging services) at colleges, and so it's worth noting that David Parry, who has been a leading experimenter in this area, posted a useful follow-up post yesterday on the AcademHack blog.

Mr. Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, expands on his philosophy for using Twitter, and offers some fresh pointers to others who have experimented with the service. For instance, he expands on a point he made during our recent Webcam interview, describing what he means by using Twitter to break down the classroom walls: "Students attend college where their identity as a student is just part of what they do and who they are. Many of them have jobs, commute to school, etc., and thus the social aspect of the campus life has changed," he writes.

"If this is the case then these 'new' ways of socializing such as Facebook and MySpace are where students are forming their learning communities, ones which do not entirely, perhaps only minimally, overlap with their classroom experience. Thus to extend the walls of the classroom, make education relevant to all aspects of students lives rather than just what they do four-five hours a day we need to think of ways to extend the ways we form and foster learning communities."

Yet many readers gave mixed reaction to Mr. Parry's basic argument in our most recent Wired Campus post on the topic. "My experience with using Twitter and anything similar — blogs, Facebook, etc. — for academic purposes is that students just think it is weird, creepy, and geeky in the negative sense," one reader said. "And they think that it’s inappropriate for me to be invading “their” space. Within two days of telling my students that I had a Facebook page, I was blocked from all of them." Thanks to everyone who wrote in -- and keep us posted on your own experience with micro-blogging. --Jeffrey R. Young