Hashing out a song among tweets

This is an interesting article, with an even more interesting quotable passage:

After class, instructors can encourage micro-blogging to support relationships among the people from the class and to further their learning. Teachers post tips of the day, questions, writing assignments, and other prompts to keep learning going.

Some believe that Twitter is even more powerful as a social learning tool outside the context of the classroom. “In a corporation, micro-blogging can be a way to augment behavior modeling,” says Sarah Millstein, author of the O’Reilly Radar Report, “Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connection, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time.”

So the problem with instructors tweeting about the class while friends, celebs and corporations are also tweeting is… why should the student care? Or maybe the question is how to get your tweets noticed (*)?

If I was teaching and tweeting (tweaching?), I would make sure that I make use of a hashtag (#something) so that students can make use of search to keep on top of what I’ve sent out. For example, I use #yegruns to track my runs, but it is open to others who are in Edmonton and want to track their runs. There are all manner of clients out there that also support searching and tracking. But simply tweeting with a hashtag and tweeting about the class isn’t going to help students pay attention to what you are doing on their dime.

If an instructor wants to use social networks to extend the class, the instructor must also be ready and willing to include some personal elements into those feeds, so tweeting about one’s own life and reflections and providing other cool bits of info in addition to the dry material of the class. This way, even if students don’t catch tweets from the classroom in their own stream, they might catch the tweets from the instructor and then remember that there might be something posted about the class, which they can then go to the instructors stream to check out.

Another option is creating an assignment where students will go out in the world to collect their data and then share it (or it’s location), again using a hashtag. In an elementary class, students could tweet prices from a grocery store. In intro Bio, students might tweet their organism counts from the field, middle school language classes can use the system to brainstorm ideas for the next writing assignment. The possibilities are almost unlimited as any assignment that might have an element of recording to it, is a potential candidate for Twitterization.

* Just for kicks, here are some stats from late in 2008 on the number of following/followers for Twitter users. Numbers might be similar now, but they might also be inflated, but regardless, using the hashtag will allow instructors to keep their tweets organized in the massive stream of data that is Twitter.

• Only 5 percent of all Twitter users have more than 250 followers.
• Only 0.8 percent have more than 1,000
• 22 percent have five or fewer followers
• Another 24 percent (the largest group) have between 11 and 25 followers