For those not in the know, Twitter is a "microblogging" site on which you can send out messages of 140 characters or less. I don't know how they settled on that, but that's what it is. I use it to share articles and links of interest with a a cadre of social work professionals interested in disability, child welfare and social work education. Although I only do this circa 1 time per week, I often find links of interest to my students on a range of topics. It has been a neat resource - but I often feel I do not use it optimally, thus, back to the question, to tweet or not to tweet?
So, as my question of the day focused on tweeting in the classroom, you make ask why. Well, Twitter raised its ugly head today, in my classroom. Stewing on the way home, I went over the scenario in my head several times. Generally, today's class went well and my students seemed fairly engaged during a mock IRB small group activity. I only had to remind one person to put down their smartphone in the midst of class. The response? Wait for it. "Just checking my Twitter to see what's happening with my family." Inside, I boiled. The students let out a combination of snorts and guffaws. Sort of a spectrum ranging from silence to snort to giggle and on to guffaw. Then all heads swung over to me. You know, the "what's she gonna do now" look.
Now, I knew that the student in question was experiencing a significant family transition, but I still deemed this behavior unacceptable and the nonchalant response a bit disrespectful. I was, however, ready. I reminded my students about what they nicknamed the "loser-takes-all" rule. At the next infraction, I will unveil my fancy new red spray-painted basket painted in late August in anticipation of this moment, and ask everyone to place their smartphones in there for the duration of our three hour course. At the start of the semester, I had explained that I wanted to have the students attention as we have difficult subject matter to "translate" as, well, research for social workers, that's really sort of like "research as a second language." I explained that if people were awaiting important calls about, say, their partner's impending delivery of baby, or some such, it would be fine to let me know and keep the phone with them. After two years of what is WAY worse than the subtle clock-check, namely, the blue screen hue under the desk, I decided I was done. Yes, I have read the reports suggesting that this generation of students learn through multi-tasking on their laptops and other devices. I can even understand this as someone who cannot conduct data analyses in SPSS without certain music on my ipod headphones. However, when the same students engaged in the smartphone checking et alia are the ones consistently doing less well in class, then it is time to act.
OK, so next week, the red basket is going around the room. And then I drove home, and sat down to dinner with my husband. We are trying a technology-free dinner time this week as we feel a little disconnected. No technology in sight. The Blackberry and iphones are off. The three laptops in our two-person home are powered down. The flat-screened television is all but a distant memory. Even the radio is turned off. And, to boot, our CD player is not working. Even my ipod is out of juice. Inhaling the soft aroma of the Gorgonzola gnocci and sipping a bit of Syrah, I watched as my husband added fresh lemon juice and olive oil to the arugula salad. Ah, lovely, no technology, back to our roots. And then it hit me. It was something along the lines of "if you can't beat em, join em" but more of a compromise. There will still be no classroom use of Twitter, but here's the plan. Open to any and all criticism!
Tonight, I am going to email my students (how passé, I know) and invite them to "follow" my professional twitter account (that's @eslayter for those already on Twitter). I am going to send reminders about papers, links of interest to particular teams conducting research on particular topics, articles related to the topic of the week, words of encouragement about getting through "research as a second language." I still won't allow it in the classroom - but I am just going to see what happens. Will they follow me? Will they ignore me? Will it facilitate engagement? Will it spawn something I don't expect that might be of use? We will see. I will let you know. I may even make a facebook page for the course as well. You never know. Follow me and see what happens.
