I’m having real trouble with Twitter of late. The stream of student consciousness that I am party to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week has revealed a world of stress, confusion and unrest. To be fair, it isn’t all negative but one tends to tune into ‘what’s wrong’ especially where it is relevant to your teaching practice or the course you are part of. Familiarity also breeds contempt and though this may be overly strong, it isn’t far from the truth.
Twitter has exposed holes in our course, that would not have been noticed by us before. Many of the tweets are ‘spur of the moment’, ‘knee-jerk reactions from tired minds, I am sure. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide which to act on and which to leave, in the hope they are transient concerns. I find myself constantly struggling whether to take the “ignorance is bliss” option and pretend that I had never opened Pandora’s Box, unfortunately it is not that easy.
Alternatively, I could face the issue more positively and use Twitter as a feedback mechanism. I know have information that could lead to enhancing the programme or improving communications between staff and learner. The ease in which we can know point students in a particular direction (to professional practitioners or hyperlinks for example) has proven to be invaluable. I now feel closer to my learners and more readily able to enagage in a more honest dialogue after the tweets have flown about. Sometimes the tweeting verges on becoming a tutorial, where snippets of guidance can be afforded 24/7. I’m sure that a few of the students actually prefer this type of support.
A great deal of the messages are frivalous and irreleavant to the programme and sifting through these streams can be both time consuming and tedious. I tend now to only read direct messages, @ replies and whatever is on my screen at the time (without having to scroll down). This method seems to work and has cut out a great deal of the open tweets that are wild and trivial.
All said and done…. the jury is still out….
Martin Aitken said,
June 15, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Interesting blog, especially since I signed up to twitter under 24 hours ago. I thought I would give it a go, and it might support me on the course, but mainly I was seeing it as a social tool.
It is great you are willing to take the points we raise seriously, and provide support whenever needed, but I am sure you know sometimes we just need to get it out of our system and get away from the course for a while! I guess you can use tweets as an ongoing summary of the mood, but in my opinion, if there are any major issues the responsibility lies with the students to raise them formally.
You are right in saying it’s not all negative, but as a member of staff you will always be looking to improve the course, and the Academy and the course encourage us to reflect on what we have done and provide constructive criticism, and therefore we will always see improvements which could be made! I feel it is human nature to not blog/tweet etc. for days on end when things are going your way, but then when you encounter a problem or something goes wrong, you want to share it. Unfortunately, it means when you look at it from your point of view, there is a lot of negative feedback.
And yes, even though I have just started using it, Twitter does seem mostly frivolous and irrelevant!
osideinde adewale said,
June 17, 2009 at 1:44 am
this is the future in the present. lecturers assisting students via twitter. whoa, cant wait to have that in my country.
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