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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
And some were skeptical and critical: "I don't want to keep up with what my students are doing when class is over...." So I respond, well, then don't. But for me it's an effective teaching tool that can change the rules of the classroom. So I'm going to continue to use it.
Briggs: What are some of the ways that you've found Twitter useful in the classroom, and what are some of the benefits?
Parry: The biggest benefit is the one I've already mentioned--the way it changes classroom dynamics. The second would be the way that it can serve both as a means of analysis and an object of analysis, especially in a media studies type of class.
In the rest of the [blog] post, I've been collecting ideas that I or different people had about some of the more practical uses of Twitter. So the third most interesting way to use Twitter is maybe this: We're always trying to teach students, especially in writing, that context determines meaning. And because Twitter has very refined rules about what you can do--only 140 characters, for example--it's developed its own sort of discursive grammar set; that can serve as an example of how rules can be productive for communication and can limit communication.
[For example] sometimes dropping periods in Twitter makes a huge difference. Other times, you can get rid of the period because it doesn't make a difference....
Briggs: As Twitter gains ground, do you think we'll be seeing more Twitter participants with some real substance, such as "Newmediajim?"
Parry: "Newmediajim" is one of the people I tell students to follow first in Twitter. He's a cameraman for NBC. He often gets to work wherever President Bush is traveling; right now he's in Africa. He's a marquee example of how mixing the mundane with the relevant gives people more insight into what's really going on. I have a much clearer picture, from following him, of what it means to be on Air Force One and create a shot and camera pools and all this other journalistic stuff.... You get a sense of him as a whole person.
The same cycle that we saw with blogs, where at first they were just personal live journals with no social value ... we've seen that in Twitter. "I'm going out for a sandwich," or, "I'm going out for lunch." But now the tech community is figuring out how to use this different form of communication to create different publics and to do other interesting things with it.
Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
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