Twitter and FYC students

Saw this interview with David Perry about the academic uses of Twitter. He says for it to work in the classroom it has to be a combination of the "mundane and the insightful." I can see students starting out twittering about what they are doing at a particular moment (i.e., admitting to eating a tub full of ripple ice cream but NOT to drinking a bottle of ripple wine!--here I'm dating myself, of course.) but how do you get them to start connecting to the class? Perry seems to think it happens naturally. I'm not so sure. Students, at least first year students, need to see the purpose for school related activities. They want it to count for something mainly because they are busy and the technology (i.e., facebook) they do every day is really a way to escape. My writing center tutors balked at using twitter outside of the center but were happy to use it as a way of communicating with me when they were on shift.

Perry also says that it gives students a sense of who he is outside the classroom and that helps learning. He says: "[I]t's not about the nodes in the network; it's about the connections you can form between information." I think that this is a fairly underrated benefit of something like twitter. But with every other sort of communication it would have to be constrained by the context (see below), as in: "I'm now twittering about my life outside the classroom"--meaning: I write particular things and not other things so my students can see me as a "real" guy. I don't want to appear cynical here but to be realistic. Connections I think arise within some sort of form, otherwise they have no walls to bounce off of to connect to something else.

Finally, there is this from Perry: "We're always trying to teach students, especially in writing, that context determines meaning. And because Twitter has very refined rules about what you can do--only 140 characters, for example--it's developed its own sort of discursive grammar set; that can serve as an example of how rules can be productive for communication and can limit communication." One way of doing twitter in the classroom might be to have students do it for a particular amount of time (at the beginning of the semester) and then have them write about the experience Provide some sources about twitter and then let them actually do their own self study. Then the twittering could be optional for the rest of the semester.