More on Twitter

I'm fascinated almost to the point of obsession with Twitter, the way I was about GoogleDocs about a month ago.

Here's a description of what it is and what it does from TechLearning:

Question: What is Twitter, and why are my students so obsessed with it?


The IT Guy says:Twitter is one of those ingenious ideas that is kind of hard to explain. That's not going to stop me from trying, of course!

Twitter is a combination of several different popular technologies, including phone text messaging and online instant messaging. You start by setting up an account at the previously-mentioned website. After you create the basic login name and password, it will offer to look though your email address book for friends who have also created Twitter accounts, but if you aren't comfortable with that (goodness knows I'm not), there is a teeny little "skip" option in the upper right-hand corner.

After that, you can start by filling in the large box that appears on the screen labeled "What are you doing?" You have 140 characters to use, so it has to be short and to the point. Then anyone can go to www.twitter.com/[your login name] and see what you have entered.

Ok, so it's short and to the point, but what is the point of doing this? The attraction is in the details. First off, once you have an account, any of your friends who also have accounts can "follow" you, which means your individual postings (which are called "tweets"—really, I'm not kidding) will show up on their page. Of course, you can choose to follow others and get their tweets on your page. And to take it to the next obsessive level, you can set up your account so that you can post your tweets from your cell phone, and receive a text message every time someone you are following posts a tweet. That's part of the powerful draw of it—you can use it with a computer or a cell phone, which means most of our students have constant access to it.

It ends up working like a slow-motion online chat, and the more people you are following or who are following you, the more entertaining it becomes. And like any powerful technology tool, it is being transformed into uses nobody would have imagined. Some professional groups are starting to use it to set up the equivalent of private news networks, sharing breaking information and rumors. One Macintosh website used it to broadcast the content from Steve Job's keynote at Macworld. It's limited only by users' imaginations.

It's also something to be very aware of in our schools. Students will of course be bugged when it's blocked on school computers, and it makes the use of the cell phone in school all that more attractive. It also allows much faster spreading of rumors. Instead of someone having to text message or call twenty friends one at a time, they can post a tweet and everyone gets it at once. If they all forward the information through their tweets, you can see how blindingly fast information (true or not) can be disseminated.

I imagine hundreds of professors sitting in sessions at some academic conference or another (but definitely NOT the one that you're currently organizing), Twittering to each other about what's going on in each session. Slowly, like a natural phenomenon, you see people back out of whatever session they're in to assemble at the most interesting of the sessions in the "tweets." I think that's one of our dirty little secrets: when we catch on to the technology, we're every bit as incorrigible as our students.

I set up a Twitter account, and my software-engineer husband agreed to do the same so I could check it out. I thought Twitter was goofy, until I got the first tweet from my husband. It was an inane detail of his daily work life, yet I was immediately hooked by how quickly I could get the information and how easy it was to share.

Mashup

I'm on a technology kick right now.

It started at the end of last semester when I was researching some technology for the AALS panels on Millennials and on laptops in the classroom. I was trying to find things that you can use with a student's laptop in the classroom -- something that keeps them engaged enough to stay away from the Internets. As usual, I discovered that I, as a law professor, was pretty much the last to know. By the time law schools get to something, it's more table knife than cutting edge. So I've been "researching" (i.e., surfing the web when I should be doing other things) what technology is being used in elementary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities.

A recent post from Campus Technology summarizes a report on what the cutting edge will be over the next five years. I haven't decided for myself yet at what point I just give up and decide thast I know all the technology I'm ever going to know, but I'm thinking it might be before I have to say "Today in class, we'll be using a mashup" with a straight face. Here's what the future looks like:

In the near term--that is, in the timeframe of about a year or less--the technologies that will have a significant impact on education include grassroots video and collaborative Web technologies. Grassroots video is, simply, user-generated video created on inexpensive consumer electronics devices and edited and encoded using free or inexpensive consumer- or prosumer-grade NLEs. Internet-based services supporting the sharing of these videos have allowed institutions to mingle their content with consumer content and "will fuel rapid growth among learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the viewers are," according to the report. The second near-term trend, collaborative Web technology, is already in wide use in education at all levels. The complete report provides further details.

In the mid-term, mobile broadband and data mashups will make their mark on education. Mashups, according to the report, will largely impact the way education institutions represent information. "While most current examples are focused on the integration of maps with a variety of data," the report said, "it is not difficult to picture broad educational and scholarly applications for mashups." Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and the University of Minnesota are examples of higher education institutions using mashups for learning resources and other projects. Mobile broadband too is in the early stages of adoption for educational purposes, from project-based learning activities to virtual field trips.

Further down the road, according to the report, come "collective intelligence" and "social operating systems." Collective intelligence includes wikis and community tagging. A social operating system is "the essential ingredient of next generation social networking" and "will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know," according to the report. The time to adoption for these last two will be four to five years, the report said.