Twitter as a learning tool

Twitter is an amazing educational tool, that has a lot of really great information, knowledge, and networking potential to it. Granted. 

BUT, I really have reservations about using it as a learning tool, and encouraging others to use it as a learning tool, without being really careful about how we implement this and put it out there. 

One thing that really jumps out at me is the idea of 'trending' and in a similar way to news items one doesn't look to the Sun for serious news, is Twitter the right place for serious discussion or examination for serious 'stuff'. 

The current Trend list highlights this point perfectly, celebrity culture and television happenings seems the bread and butter of Twitter- is it really therefore a serious place for discussion?! 



Now all news sites focus on the 'cool' and 'sexy' topics to get readers in, but most at least have a little bit of proper news in amongst it. Twitter doesn't even try- or rather what is interesting to its user base is pretty shallow, meaningless, celebrity obsessed drivel. 

Comments

  1. Anonymous21 June 2015 at 23:27

    Hi Will,

    Very interesting post on your reservations of using Twitter as a learning tool. Like you, when Twitter was first introduced I thought to myself "why would I want to follow celebrities and companies? I'm only interested in finding out what my friends and family are up too!”.

    However, after some experimentation I started finding useful feeds and realising the benefits of Twitter, especially for breaking news and live updates. I would say that I now use Twitter more than Facebook.

    I think like any tool or communication method, it requires some exploration and setting of boundaries for it to be used appropriately. For example, if you were to use Twitter in the classroom you would encourage learners to use and follow a specific hashtag, therefore helping to reduce the number of external distractions.

    We shouldn't forget that Twitter is not the only microblogging platform available. There are a number of other tools available, which may be better suited, see: http://tinyurl.com/n9t7ncn

    Danny

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