Transforming distance learning

I’ve been checking out Twitter on Andy(Ramsden)’s suggestion in order to get ideas for its possible use in HE. I’ve found a couple of Twitter buddies who’ve been helping me out – a guy I met when working for the Judo Foundation Degree (hi Lance) and Dave Parry, who is a bit of an expert on academic use of Twitter.

Dave Parry describes several ideas for using Twitter with students, and the resulting blurring of academic and social communication that he describes has similarities with the results Gabriele (Edwards) and Geraldine (Jones) reported recently with their Edutext study at Bath. Is this a good thing? There are positive and negative aspects – on one hand, one deals with a considerable amount of ‘noise’, but on the other, this additional insight can have a positive effect on the tutor-student relationship, and improve classroom dynamics. I know how excited I felt the first time one of my online distance learning students cracked a joke.

Tracking words does seem to be an interesting way of exploring a topic – there’s the potential of finding something that (or someone who) can really open up your world. I’d never really explored the work of Jacques Derrida before today (Dave Parry is doing some work on Derrida with his students).

Following professionals might be a worthwhile activity to try out, too – although Twitter’s Search facility appears to be broken, so my attempts to follow Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins have been temporarily thwarted. They’re probably not on Twitter anyway (but I hope they are). I’ve asked Dave for any suggestions he has of good examples of academic twitterers. In the meantime I’ll check out the two examples he gives in his article.

The comments left at the bottom of Dave’s article contain some more useful links from eminent academic twitterers. Alan Lew and ‘Chris L’ both mention the need for separate accounts to address the lack of group capability in Twitter.

The grammar issue is an interesting one. I’m a bit of a stickler for correct grammar in formal and semi-formal contexts – to the point where I go catatonic if someone claims that ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ are interchangeable (I know it’s recently been made official, but I refuse to accept it) . However, I think it’s unfortunate that some people can’t differentiate between formal written communication and informal, technology-enabled communication such as SMS, IM, Twitter and so on. The objectives and priorities attached to them are very different. Yes, they all make use of visual characters, but I don’t hear anyone claiming a parliamentary speech is a more valid form of communication than a phone call to one’s grandmother. All communication should aim to be a) unambiguous and b) efficient, and that’s pretty much the sum of it (in my opinion).

Oh – and Clive Thomson’s article on the sixth sense of Twitter is interesting (and brief – hooray). He says: “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.”…

…which is why I’m going to carry on trying it out. More later!