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by Zach Miners
At the
Though Twitter might not be quite as popular among students as
At
In the moment. The biggest challenge, Young says, is getting students who are convinced that they will never need the technology to give Twitter a try. But many of her students are jumping in and have taken on business projects with local companies and made recommendations on whether the firms should use services like Twitter, blogs, or E-mail newsletters. When the Internet-based marketing class ended in May, the students continued to post tweets, Young says.
Young even had several of her students tweeting from their cellphones during the school's 2009 commencement. The result was a play-by-play of quips on the ceremony, right down to one student complaining that her "sash is falling off." And because all the tweets were uniformly tagged and updated, other members of the audience -- as well as those watching online and on the local public-access TV channel -- stumbled upon the Twitter feed and posted their own tweets. "It's all right in the moment," says Young.
Another educator who's leveraging that instant-access information is David Parry, a professor of emerging media at the
"One thing that has changed about higher education is the idea that people come and sit in a dorm and, after class, they share ideas," says Parry. "A lot of that is gone now, because students work two jobs, they don't live in dorms. . . . But Twitter is making up for it, in a way."
Parry's students helped Rankin use Twitter in her classroom. And a former student of Parry's, who now works for the
Howard Rheingold, who teaches at the
Bringing sites like Twitter into an academic environment is a teaching style that has seen a fair share of criticism. Some say that restricting users to 140-character blurbs ruins students' writing skills and destroys their attention spans.
Rheingold says that how useful Twitter is depends on the individual person. "If you want to share information in small bites with a group of people who share your interest," he says, "that's what it's for."
Available at Amazon.com:
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The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price
The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition (College Admissions Guides)
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Students & Professors use Twitter to Communicate Inside & Outside the Classroom