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I’ll start by providing links to two articles (here is one, and here is the another), about teacher Monica Rankin using Twitter in instructional application at the University of Texas at Dallas. These are a few of many stories about Professor Rankin’s efforts (this highly covered case is what really triggered my perception that there were a lot of articles about Twitter in the classroom in recent weeks).

This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses instructor Cole Camplese’s use of Twitter, streaming Tweets from students on screen during lectures, as part of the instructional process.

Slumdog Millionaire inspired by Hole-in-the-Wall

Now, more than ever before, it is critical to look at solutions that complement the framework of traditional schooling. Minimally Invasive Education™ is one such solution – a solution that uses the power of collaboration and the natural curiosity of children to catalyze learning.

Not everybody has to teach with technology, but it does need to be deeply embedded throughout the ecosystem we create on campus - and not because "that's what students want" or "that's where the students are."  The surprising-to-most-people-fact is that students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially *participatory* technologies that ask them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise).  I use wikis, blogs, twitter and other social media in the classroom not because our students use them, but because I am afraid that social media might be using them – that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create.  I use social media not only as an effective teaching tool that encourages participation, but also as a way to broaden the media literacy of our students.  In this regard, we still have a great deal of work to do.  We need to embed new media literacy more deeply into the curriculum so that it isn't just this "one crazy Anthropology class" (as I have heard my class fondly referred to by students) that showed them how they can effectively use these tools in ways they had not yet imagined, while also allowing them to see a little more clearly how these tools are using them, altering their habits, sensibilities, and values as well as the larger structural contexts in which they live.

Whatever tool professors can find to conjure that—curiosity and a sense of amazing possibilities—is what they should use, he says. Like any good lecture, his point may be more inspirational than instructive. "Students and faculty have to have this sense that they can truly connect with each other," he concludes. "Only through that sense of connection do you have this sense of community."