Making sense of the noise and turning Twitter into an education

As my legion of twitter followers lurches forward, I am beginning to discover the art of adding/removing followers depending on the noise they generate. Now don’t be dismayed by this admission, many tweets have value and can entertain even inform. But you begin to learn who makes noise and has no sense to their multifarious communiqués.

Getting links to allsorts, multi-tweets that have a 1 character change amongst other tactics, make the twittersphere a noisy world.

With all of this in mind I have often considered how we (you dear reader and I) could turn twitter into an educational tool. Tools such as twitterfeed and tweet-u-latter, linked to twitpic and bit.ly (amongst many others I am sure) give an interesting prospect.

A student, using ‘whatever’ platform, could be delivered a course, assessment, notices, support etc via a RSS/Twitter stream into whatever platform they wish.

Potentially this could be either open source or via a managed access where the bit.ly pushes to a secure site.

Consider the potential, an educational experience that could be accessed via many systems, without the provider deciding what these systems are, leaving it in the hands of the learner. A goal many have strived for and is probably already here.

Andrew Smith
Follow me on Twitter: @teraknor

Comments

  1. Anonymous25 February 2010 at 00:34

    And in terms of managing students, if they all have an email address in the same domain (e.g., name@student.college.edu/ac.country) then Yammer could be used to corral them very effectively.

    Aubrey

    ReplyDelete

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