Ways to use Twitter in Academia:
Some of these ideas are general, and some are specifically from a Twittering assignment I did for a class last semester. When I first added it to the syllabus I had no idea what to expect. It was just sort of an experiment that I had planned for the end of the semester (all of the students signed up for twitter and followed each other). After using it I have to say it was one of the better things I did with that class, for reasons I will explain below.
Class Chatter: The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class. Most of these conversations were not directly related to class material, but many were tangentially related. Because the students had the shared classroom experience when something came up outside of class that reminded them of material from class time it often got twittered. This served as a reinforcement/connection between the material and the “real world.”