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"Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation. This problem is compounded by the recent budget cuts that have squeezed ever more students into each room. Fortunately, educators (including myself) have found that Twitter is an effective way to broaden participation in lecture. Additionally, the ubiquity of laptops and smartphones have made the integration of Twitter a virtually bureaucracy-free endeavor. This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture."

I do think that the author's conclusion about it being a great way to deal with growing class sizes due to budget cuts is simplistic and misses the point about it being a great way to engage students, period. Be sure to watch the video.

"A growing literature suggests that there is a disjuncture between the instructional practices of the education system and the student body it is expected to serve, particularly with respect to the roles of digital technologies. Based on surveys and focus group interviews of first-year students at a primarily undergraduate Canadian university and focus group interviews of professors at the same institution, this study explores the gaps and intersections between students' uses and expectations for digital technologies while learning inside the classroom and socializing outside the classroom, and the instructional uses, expectations and concerns of their professors. It concludes with recommendations for uses of digital technologies that go beyond information transmission, the need for extended pedagogical discussions to harness the learning potentials of digital technologies, and for pedagogies that embrace the social construction of knowledge as well as individual acquisition."

"Undergraduates are significantly more likely to major in a field if they have an inspiring and caring faculty member in their introduction to the field. And they are equally likely to write off a field based on a single negative experience with a professor."

"The expectation for researchers to have a presence beyond academia coincides with another shift that is making social impact now possible, for many researchers, and this is the rise of social media. These new, virtual environments are not just characterized by popular, personalized platforms like Facebook and Twitter, although I will come to these. Rather, social media encompasses the entire architecture of the scholarly Web today, best known as Web 2.0, which is a new way of organizing digital media content. While computing transformed scholarship in many ways before the rise of social media platforms, the average end-user experience, even for a novice, has altered considerably within just the last five years."

"Some professors are using Twitter in innovative-and effective-ways that benefit students. Here are five unique ways Twitter is enhancing education:"

"Dr. Rankin, professor of History at UT Dallas, wanted to know how to reach more students and involve more people in class discussions both in and out of the classroom. She had heard of Twitter... She collaborated with a graduate student, Kim Smith, from the Emerging Media and Communications (EMAC) and reached out to EMAC faculty for advice.  As a Graduate student in EMAC I assisted her in The Twitter Experiment and documented the project to share with others. "

"The Wikipedia Education Program's vision is to mobilize and empower the next generation of human-knowledge generators to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Based on the learnings from the Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program to use Wikipedia in university classrooms in the 2010-11 academic year, the Wikipedia Education Program strives to expand Wikipedia's use as a teaching tool worldwide. Professors who participate in our program assign their students to edit Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. Students are assisted by trained Wikipedia Ambassadors, who help both in the class and on wiki. You can get a quick introduction to how the program is structured at Wikipedia Education Program/A-Z. Additional resources are available at the Education portal."

"Mark Carrigan shares excerpts from the academic blog written by Professor of Philosophy and University Chancellor, Daniel Little and reflects on the professional development and rising influence of the open-source academic. For both Little and Carrigan, the integration of blogging into working practices constitutes the starting point for traditional scholarship rather than something in opposition to it."

"As Bakary Diallo, a professor from the African Virtual University, reportedly remarked at a recent meeting among international educators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students in other parts of the world have their "own realities," their "own context and culture." It would be absurd to ignore how significantly those realities shape students' participation in our virtual classrooms."

A university professor relates how teaching fourth-grade helped prepare her for her role in higher education.

"It all started when a student approached Professor John Boyer after class one day and, inspired by a documentary they viewed about Southeast Asia, suggested the class talk to Aung San Suu Kyi. Boyer's knee-jerk response was skepticism; why on earth would a prominent world figure talk to a class of college students across the world? But with the help of other students in the class, they put together a video pitch, and it gained enough traction on social media to make the seemingly impossible happen: Boyer's students got their interview."

"MOOCs, however, are a game-changer, for a lot of reasons. I won't hash out all the pros and cons here. (I'm on the pro side.) But whatever the potential faults or limitations of MOOCs, the fact that they are free and open to all makes them, at least, a good place for low-stakes experiments. And that quality makes them extremely valuable to people who otherwise can't easily get themselves into a student desk, including college teachers. In short, MOOCs give us access to a simulation of the college student experience. Let me explain how that worked for me recently."

"Once students started Twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half" "Dr. Parry declared that "it was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I've ever done teaching."

From the site's FAQ: "IS IT UNETHICAL FOR ME TO BUY AN ESSAY? If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Only you can answer that question. ISN'T IT REALLY UNETHICAL FOR YOU TO BE WRITING THESE ESSAYS FOR CASH? Incredibly so, and because the academic system is already so corrupt, we're totally cool with that. We even all have matching tweed t-shirts."