People ask me all the time how twitter could be used in education...oh, I don't know...this seems to be a pretty creative use to me. Of course with all eLearning tools, your learners MUST already be there. If you have an audience already utilizing twitter then this makes perfect sense. It might also make sense if your goal is to combine a history lesson with a technology lesson. This could get twitter haters to see the technology in a whole new way as well.
Its all about being creative and seeing things differently. Stop trying to use twitter as a replacement for your chalkboard. That won't work...if you haven't already found out.
You've got to engage with new media and just use it for a while before you can start to see creative learning solutions like this. I'm looking forward to seeing how the story unfolds.
DevLearn 2010 Conference and Expo - November - San Francisco, CA
3 comments:
I like this scenario. It's making me think again about Twitter for a start; and multi-channel delivery, too. Above all, especially for kids this must be great FUN! (but not exclusively).
It reminds me of kids taking their hearing tests. Tell them they're listening to astronauts signalling from space and they'll sit through the whole exam. Don't and they spend all their time asking if its finished yet.
Do we know if this Twitter message scenario works asynchronously, though? A list of Tweets could equal only a presentation? However, the anticipation of fresh Tweets in a historic 'real time' should certainly grab our attention! Do we repeat the Tweets annually, or build the War for 5-years...(how big is the universe)...?
Thanks for the interesting post.
This is a terrific example of how the *experience* of social media coming as a stream interspersed with everything else can change its significance and impact. I'm projecting here, but for students to both have the events ongoing in their lives outside class, and to actually have some sense of the speed of progression, and what everyone had to react to, is completely unlike how I learned about this history. At minimum it must awaken an interest in some kids who otherwise wouldn't be interested. But more so, they can start reacting to each other via twitter, perhaps their own ideas about what to do, or relating it to personal family history from the time. And they'd end up discovering connections to people far away through the magic of twitter hashtags.
This George Orwell Diary has the similar effect. (a blog that update Orwell's diary of the same day 70 years ago). It thread your daily life to something big in history, makes you connected to the past in the contingent modern life.
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