Twitter Beat

This is a project that Viola Lasmana, Al Harahap and I came up with. For our SF Renaissance project we decided to use Twitter as our new media put to pedagogical use.

Why Twitter?

Interaction and conversations among students in the classroom:

• Provides a dynamic, easy-to-follow feed for students in the classroom
• Students can easily view and interact with other students in the classroom
• Students can easily reply to or re-tweet their classmates’ tweets

Student work made public:

• Dialogues are taken beyond the classroom: anyone can see the tweets
• Students become aware of the publicness of their work
• Students become more responsible over the work they produce and put out there
• Possibilities for knowledge creation is expanded as students are able to "follow" and read other Twitter users' tweets that are related to the SF Renaissance, etc. For instance, students are able to have dialogues with students from other universities who may be tweeting about the SF Renaissance as well

Users can provide links to pictures, videos, websites, etc. on a tweet.

Twitter can be used throughout the semester as a platform for students to publish their work in. For instance, students are encouraged to post tweets about their latest class blog, essay, etc., so that their work is more visible and invite more interactions, and more importantly, Twitter's interface provides a more accessible platform for students to be able to see one another's works. Rather than using RSS feeds which can get tedious, Twitter is used as both feeds to student work, as well as to produce information about specific topics.

The use of Twitter encourages more production of media and knowledge in and out of the classroom.

How:

For a class the size of our seminar, with 15-20 students, we would have each student create their own twitter account and have all the students "follow" one another via their accounts. During the unit, the students would be required to search for artifacts or resources that relate to the SF Renaissance and to "tweet" about them. This would take the conversation out of the classroom and would get the students dialoguing with one another through twitter about the unit subject. Individual students would be assigned particular topics relating to the SF Renaissance (i.e. drugs & literature, poetry readings, the 1950s, etc.).

The key step in the fruition of the entire project would be that the students would discuss the "tweeted" artifacts in class, decide what has reliability, value, worth, etc. and the agreed upon "tweets" would be added to a class twitter account solely created to "TweeT" about the topic of SF Renaissance. This would be an account where those across the globe interested in the beats, would be able to follow the account to get valuable information, articles, artifacts, etc., (and most ideally from a class being taught in San Francisco). This particular account would also be available for additions by future classes. The future classes would be able to learn from the work produced and to add their own. This "research" and analysis of the
artifacts brought in would give the students the much needed practice to understand what information online has validity, value, reliability, etc.

If the class were taught here in SF, it would be an added benefit to have certain students, with the capability, to post "location tweets". This way, there would be actually "tweets" that would reference particular locations in the city (relating this twitter project to our work on mapping the SF Renaissance in the city)."

Concerns to consider:

• For a larger class, the same process of setting up separate topics within the context of the beats would apply, but to groups rather than individuals. The groups would then come together in class to discuss their themes separately and report to the class together.
  

• Having 60 plus students "tweeting" would be a little much to consume for the each individual student and the teacher, so the students would do research together as groups and bring their suggested artifacts into class to present. The same final step would apply here, where the decided upon artifacts would be posted to the SF Renaissance Twitter account.

• This study brings up a couple of concerns:
• 65% of tweets are still tweeted from a desktop browser, so only 35% are from mobile applications. We need to find out how many students in the class really would have constant access to the tweets. If not everyone does, do we still go ahead with the assignment? If so, is there some way to limit the tweeting of those with mobile capabilities so that those without do not feel left out from the constant exchange of information? What are the ethical-pedagogical implications of having only some of the class with instantaneous access to the tweets, while others only certain times during the day?
  
• 60% of tweeters quit within the first month. Short of the forceful requirement that students mustparticipate in the tweeting, what preparation can we do as a class to make them see the value of Twitter and tweeting as learning tools?

• For students outside of the Bay Area and New York City Area, are there geolocation exercise alternatives that could incorporate their own local/regional literary spatial-rhetorical histories?
• Would doing so veer off into a literary period/movement other than the San Francisco Renaissance? Perhaps this would be fine as a gesture towards going into the next unit of the class, if the idea is for the same kind of new media exercise to be just as engaging for students in the rest of the country (and world).