What’s the point of Twitter?
Laura Walker’s blog post “Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter“ has caused quite a bit of interest on both sides of the Atlantic in the last couple of days. Walker is a capable advocate, and her reasons stand up very well. The comments which follow her posting are also interesting, and give an idea how divided the educational communities are on this question. I think that this reflects a long-standing dissatisfaction in many quarters recently, based on a a whole host of factors: e.g. the failure of the VLE to support conversational learning in the way that it intially promised, uncertainties about the quality of and access to free online resources, and the difficulty of creating and sustaining coherent online communities of practice amongst teachers. I could go on.
This all adds up to the feeling that there are some pieces missing from the jigsaw which will make up the online learning environment of the future. A few of us are thinking that Twitter, or something like it, just might be an important component of our online worlds. It won’t solve the whole problem, but as Twitter acquires more users, its power to forge links between distant partners is becoming undeniable. Walker’s post, for example, reached me via London and California. Did it need to? Of course not, but it has been passed to me by someone whose views I trust, and has therefore acquired credence. And I am not sure that I know how to design a Google search which would have brought that posting to the top…
