This week I was officially awarded a Professional Development Grant, which will make my travel to San Fran for 4Cs much easier on the wallet. I’m also 1 week away from receiving final exam essays from the students I asked to start Twitter accounts. Their responses will be the basis of my presentation, and I already know that I’m going to continue with this research next semester b/c I’ve learned so much from them in terms of what their 1st semester college freshman experiences.

This semester I let students protect their updates and only follow me as a way to let them explore the informal writing space; however, I think next semester I will require students to follow all their peers in class too. That way, especially for my online writing courses, we can build community and more easily and quickly share resources. The discussion board posts can evolve to be more formal writing responses and Twitter can remain informal.

More on this once I see if my current students even feel that maintaining the timeline helped them reflect on their tech literacy, but here’s a video created by the folks at Twitter about how and why some people use the microblogging tool. If you notice, nearly everyone is updating from their phones…something I plan to point out to my students!



How Do You Use Twitter? from biz stone on Vimeo.