ryancw's blog

I chose to view the presentation “Teaching and Learning with Twitter” by Steve Wheeler.  Mr. Wheeler is an Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.  Some aspects he is very knowledge about include e-learning, student support, psychological issues in distance education, creativity, the social web (Web 2.0) and learning technology.  I chose this article because I am fascinated with Twitter and its capabilities.  In addition, I believe that it will stick around and will continue to grow.  It’s important to learn about how education could be impacted with Twitter and some ways it could be used in the classroom.

Many facts are discussed about Twitter within this presentation.  Twitter takes time to build a network, develop your own Twitter style, and its full scope.  Mr. Wheeler continued to also discuss some disadvantages and barriers of using Twitter in an educational context.  Some questions that came up in his presentation includes: “How do we use Twitter with children when we can’t be sure how open Twitter is?” “What do we do about maintenance of confidentiality, privacy and the need to protect kids from internet predators?” Another question relates to something he posted recently about why Twitter is so powerful.   It relates to the need to persist with the tool, so that you give it enough time to build up a critical mass of followers and followed, ensuring that your personal learning network (PLN) becomes effective.   It also discusses how effective Twitter is in developing a PLN, and is described that a live tweetout usually shows everyone just how effective Twitter can be in connecting to a world of knowledge, experts and resources.

Another concern Mr. Wheeler talks about is age.  Some argue that Twitter is more the preserve of older people and that younger people tend to reject the tool because it doesn’t have the attractive affordances of other social networking tools such as Facebook. Mr. Wheeler also talks about the issue of instant gratification of how do younger people feel about having to invest in developing their network of followers/followed when it patently takes a lot of effort and time?  Overall I enjoyed this presentation and learned a significant amount of information of advantages and disadvantages to using it in education.