Twitter in Retrospect

Friday I used Twitter in my freshman composition class. The results were surprising. Being that my class is at 3:00 p.m., and it was the day before spring break, I figured my students might enjoy something a bit out of the ordinary. I gave them a brief background on Twitter and had them watch the short introductory movie on the website. Three of my eighteen attending students had heard of Twitter; of those three, none had used it.

My assignment was quite simple: use the constrictions of Twitter to craft a thesis (or research question, topic idea) for the up coming argumentative essay. The class had been working on brainstorming their topics, heuristic questions, etc. for several days and had a loose idea on what they’d be writing about. (I gave them the freedom to choose what they wanted to argue, but maintained veto power over certain fruitless topics).

I emphasized the attention to word choice, the exercise’s arbitrary (arbitrary when writing an actual thesis) character count, and the need for preciseness in a thesis. After ten minutes of working, I asked some students to put their thesis on the doc cam and walk us through why they stated the thesis the way they did – if they found the task difficult, if they had to change some words to fit the count, if they were comfortable with that thesis.

One student had a thesis that was half the character-limit. The class decided hers was overly broad and not precise: she should have spent more characters clarifying and focusing. Another student had to change the word “enthusiasm” to “work” in his thesis: the class talked about the word choice, the reasons for such a drastic change, and possible alternatives. Of those that presented, a majority of them found the task difficult to manage (those who didn’t fell quite short of the limit and their theses were unfocused).

Overall, the exercise was a bit rough. I wish I had done a lot more with it, but the students seemed extremely apathetic (probably because spring break was nigh), which made me despondent. Perhaps my expectations were overly high, but I was taken aback by how few of the class knew about the microblogging tool; given the statistics, a number more should have at least heard of it. I think, however, that with more polish and experience, the exercise could be even more productive. A look at some of the TwitLit created with the application, checking out a famous person’s feed, or more time spent discussing the application before jumping into working with it may help.

If you’ve used Twitter in your classroom (composition or other; successfully or unsuccessfully), let me know.