Micro Blogging with Twitter

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Interview

Micro Blogging with Twitter

A Q&A with David Parry, assistant professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas at Dallas

3/5/2008

By Linda L Briggs

Twitter is a software tool that allows users to continually post (or "tweet") very short text messages to the Web from computers or mobile phones. These quick public messages simply describe what a user is currently doing. Twitter's appeal has mushroomed, making it a much-discussed new technology and highly popular with 18- to-25-year-old users.

Depending on your point of view, Twitter is either a cool new way to connect or yet more online noise. But Twitter as an academic tool? In this interview, we talk with David Parry, assistant professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas at Dallas, who recently blogged about using Twitter in class.

Linda Briggs: I've registered with Twitter and poked around a bit, and it's fun, but I'm not sure I see the academic value.

David Parry: I'll say two things about Twitter in academia. One, its uses in academia parallel its uses in the business world. It's a networking, water-cooler-talk kind of environment, where you don't see people every day, but you feel connected because you get updates on what they are doing in their life every day.

Also, it's a mixture of the insightful plus the mundane. So students will send me "I am looking for rain boots" or "I am going to meet someone at a coffee shop to buy something that I just bought on craigslist" along with the insightful, where they'll say something like, "Oh, I saw this news article on TV that relates to what we talked about in class."

But is has to be both of those things for Twitter to really work.

Briggs: So it's important to have the mundane along with the insightful? And you do find that students really are posting some insightful things?

Parry: Yes. Students use it as a way to talk about their classes. Often, the chatter will turn to talking about their schoolwork because that forms so much of what their life is about. But also, it gives me a sense--and I think it gives the students a sense--of what a person is like outside of the classroom. Knowing that substantially changes the dynamics of what goes on inside the classroom. I think people end up being a lot more comfortable with classroom discourse and get a sense that [the instructor] isn't just someone who comes in and talks for an hour and 30 minutes twice a week. It has the very positive effect of altering the classroom state to not just be contained by the four walls, and by meeting twice a week.

Briggs: So students get to know you better, and they get to know each other better outside the classroom?

Parry: Yes, but ... it's not some sort of kum-ba-ya, touchie-feelie thing. It's ... really hard to describe without doing it, but you get this sort of sixth sense of the fact that there are other people out there in the world to whom you are connected, who are doing things all the time. And you get a sense of what they're doing.