Tweaching

This question came up over the last week that I’ve been working on a poster for an upcoming symposium – how you ever convince students to follow their prof on Twitter or any of the other microblogging services? My answer to this was a non committal – I don’t know, first we have to convince the prof to get onboard first. The followup? How do we do that? Easy…

Do you want to find out who won the Nobel Prize first? How about what some NASA project is up to? What about the LHC? Not interested in following faceless (or multi faced) groups, How about just searching for what you are interested in and see what people are saying about it?

Once the instructor is using the tool for their own purposes, they will find ways to encourage their students to get onboard. They may post interesting articles, they may re-tweet interesting observations from colleagues, or they may just offer “office tweets”… imagine, office hours dealing with most problems 140 characters at a time.

Microblogging is like any new tool that comes along, there isn’t a one size fits all solution.

If there are Post Sec instructors out there reading this, please post in the comments how you’ve tried to integrate Twitter or other microblogging services and to what success?