Serendipity35

Twitter keeps people in touch with all their friends (and by that I mean friend in the social network way, as in "Ken has 1027 friends.") no matter where they are or what they are doing. With Twitter, you can make mobile updates via your phone, but you can also check things on the web.

I don't have a Twitter account, but I can still "follow" people online if I'm really curious. For example, there are currently more than 54,000 people following tech broadcaster Leo Laporte on Twitter.

How does Twitter work?When you send in a mobile text message, Twitter sends it out to the group of friends that "follow" you and posts it to your Twitter page. You are limited to 140 characters, so here's not much content there, unless you "tweet" all day long.

That's limiting, but I know many writers (especially poets) will tell you that formal writing (like sonnets, villanelles and the similarly short haiku) actually leads them to a kind of freedom.

This kind of updating is also known as microblogging. As a blogger, I consider microblogging to be insulting. Microblogging is a form that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user.

Different services allow different forms of input: text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web. Twitter is the most popular and launched in July 2006. Its main competitor seems to be Jaiku which was acquired by Google. A newcomer is Pownce, which integrates micro-blogging with file-sharing and event invitations.

So what do I have against Twitter? I'll let Clive Thompson, who writes on Wired, (and Clive is on Twitter) start my answer:

Twitter is the app that everyone loves to hate. Odds are you've noticed people - probably younger than you - manically using Twitter, a tool that lets you post brief updates about your everyday thoughts and activities to the Web via browser, cell phone, or IM. The messages are limited to 140 characters, so they lean toward pithy, haiku-like utterances. When I dropped by the main Twitter page, people had posted notes like "Doing lunch and picking up father-in-law from senior center." Or "Checking out Ghost Whisperer" or simply "Thinking I'm old." (Most users are between 18 and 27.)

It might seem like blogging taken to a supremely banal extreme. Productivity guru Tim Ferriss calls Twitter "pointless email on steroids." One Silicon Valley businessman I met complained that his staff had become Twitter-obsessed. "You can't say anything in such a short message," he said, baffled. "So why do it at all?"

They're precisely right: Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter - and the similarly mundane Dodgeball, a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends - is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

For example, when I meet Misha for lunch after not having seen her for a month, I already know the wireframe outline of her life: She was nervous about last week's big presentation, got stuck in a rare spring snowstorm, and became addicted to salt bagels. With Dodgeball, I never actually race out to meet a friend when they report their nearby location; I just note it as something to talk about the next time we meet.

It's almost like ESP, which can be incredibly useful when applied to your work life. You know who's overloaded (better not bug Amanda today) and who's on a roll. A buddy list isn't just a vehicle to chat with friends but a way to sense their presence. Are they available to talk? Have they been away? This awareness is crucial when colleagues are spread around the office, the country, or the world. Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees.

So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it's experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can't explain the appeal. You have to do it and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn't have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It's practically collectivist - you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.

Mind you, quick-ping media can be a massive time-suck. You also may not want more information pecking at your frayed attention span. And who knows? Twitter's rabid fans (their numbers are doubling every three weeks) may well abandon it for a shinier new toy. It happened to Friendster.

But here's my bet: The animating genius behind Twitter will live on in future apps. That tactile sense of your community is simply too much fun, too useful and it makes the group more than the sum of its parts.

I have yet to see any of the "social proprioception" that Thompson speaks of in action in any way that seems educationally interesting. I'm sure some educators are using Twitter with students (if so, you have a buzzworthy presentation proposal for the next conference), but nothing I have seen has made an impression on me.

Educause posted their 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter which includes this:

What are the implications for teaching and learning? Much has been written about the benefits of active learning strategies— using tools and techniques that engage students in ways other than simply listening to an instructor and taking notes. In the same way that clickers facilitate active learning, Twitter, too, could be used in an academic setting to foster interaction about a given topic. Metacognition - the practice of thinking about and reflecting on your learning - has been shown to benefit comprehension and retention. As a tool for students or professional colleagues to compare thoughts about a topic, Twitter can be a viable platform for metacognition, forcing users to be brief and to the point an important skill in thinking clearly and communicating effectively. In addition, Twitter can provide a simple way for attendees at a conference
to share thoughts about particular sessions and activities with others at the event and those unable to attend.

 

I had an online chat session last night with my grad students for day 1 of the course. It was semi-useful. A few good questions. Nothing that could not have been posted more clearly in the Moodle forum and that might have generated several more thoughtful responses from me and other students there, and then would be archived for those who were not in the chat. (And yes, I keep a chat log - which no one ever looks at...)

 

Actually, I do microblog a bit. Facebook has a little box to put what you are doing right now, and I usually change my message. But I only check into Facebook a few times a week, so it hardly keeps anyone up to date on me. (Come to think of it, a few times a week probably DOES keep you up to date on me!)

Microblogging teaches/models/encourages the short response. Along with instant messaging and earlier email, it gets all of us into the habit of clipping our answers. We tend to ignore grammar and mechanics. It gets you thinking in the same way that PowerPoint slides with bullets do - that everything can be simplified to a few keywords.

Teachers ask students to respond to short "essay" questions hoping for a paragraph or more and too often get a sentence or fragment.  Q: Why is Sarah Palin a surprising vice-presidential choice for John McCain?  A: She's a woman. From Alaska.

Back in the early 90s, the Comedy Central channel ran a show called Short Attention Span Theater. It was pretty funny, but I found the joke all too close to real. With several generations of students weaned on the way-too-rapid pace and ever changing topics of Sesame Street and other children's shows (I miss Mister Rogers), and diagnoses of ADD being handed out like handouts, our classrooms have become Short Attention Span Theaters.

The grownups who do media news are always looking for the "sound bite." It's the lead to a story that will never follow.

When I was in grad school studying media, I recall a professor comparing television viewing to Plato's allegory of the cave. It seemed a bit much then. Now, I wonder. Enter the classroom, darken the lights, turn on the projector and from the cool fire of the computer cast images and keywords on the screen. Tweet, tweet.