Group items tagged

In my own classes I've been deliberately vague about what students should tweet about. I didn’t want overly prescriptive guidelines to constrain what might be possible. Instead, I wanted our integration of Twitter to evolve organically. Given this open-ended invitation, I’ve found students tend to use Twitter for class in three ways: to post news and share resources relevant to the class; to ask questions and respond with clarifications about the readings; and to write sarcastic, irreverent comments about the readings or my teaching. The first two behaviors add to the community spirit of the class and help to sustain student interest across the days and weeks of the semester. The third behavior, when I first noticed it, was an utterly unexpected finding. (And as I've argued elsewhere, it was a good, powerful surprise that legitimated my use of Twitter in and outside of the classroom. I saw students take an oppositional stance in their writing—a welcome reprieve from the majority of student writing, which avoids taking any stance at all.)

I strongly recommend creating a permanent Twitter archive. A free service such as TwapperKeeper will track a specified hashtag, collecting the tweets 24/7, and you simply return to TwapperKeeper any time to download the archive. It's so easy to use that I've begun creating TwapperKeeper archives for any hashtag there's even the slightest chance I'll be interested in revisiting later. Another useful archiving tool is called, appropriately enough, The Archivist.

as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.

"Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.

an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).