Tweeting is for the birds

Twitter by definition is "a short burst of inconsequential information". I couldn't agree more. As the world has progressed around us, so have our lives become progressively more and more filled with distractions. We often complain of having too little time to do the things we want to do or get done. So why, then, do we decide to willingly spend our time reading and reporting short bursts of trivial information?

In her article Adrienne Matteson declares that because of its “simplicity and versatility” Twitter can be a power teaching tool. I may not argue the versatility aspect of Twitter, however, the simplicity of it, I would like to challenge. The very fact that there are 24 “Twitter Twerminology”, most of which are actual English words spelled incorrectly in an effort to be labeled as “Twitter” words. This brings up the issue of one of the biggest hang-ups I have with tweeting, the overuse and acceptance of misspelled words. Encouraging my students to shorten words and phrases in order to meet the character limit is something I am strongly against doing. Just the fact that there is such a limit doesn’t allow for students to form complete thoughts or incorporate things such as metaphors, syllogisms, or similes into their writing. Proper grammar and spelling goes out the window, and as an English teacher, that’s hard for me to encourage.

A big problem I have with incorporating Twitter into my classroom, is the distraction it can cause. In her article Adrienne Matteson writes, “In this way, teachers can give students the power to discuss a topic, ask and answer questions, post links to useful sources, and comment on those sources; all while continuing to take notes”. Seriously? Students can do all this simultaneously and pay attention to what you are saying? She says twitter is a great way to check a students understanding. I understand that creating a quiz online for the students to fill out could tell me who got the most correct, but how do I know they didn’t just look up the answers on Google? Or get the answers from a friend?

Matteson discusses how Twitter can be used as a forum for a collective writing assignment, allowing students to build the work together. I think this concept is fantastic, however, wouldn’t it be even better if it is done in person? Where students are engaged in discussion and can see one another while they talk and bounce ideas off each other? Through doing this story on Twitter, each student can add onto the others part, without being in the same room. If the students were not talking their ideas out, a collaborative story would be pulled in different directions, each student pulling the story in the way they want to take it. It would be a summation of a bunch of independent thoughts. The story would not be about or by the students as a whole, but rather a montage by them. They would not have written it as a true unit. In looking at articles written by a unit of people in history, such as the Constitution and The Declaration of Independence, would these two articles have worked if they had been formed through tweeting? Would they have been able to write “we the people” as a collaborative group?

Tweeting in class takes away from actual talk time and interaction with the teacher. It causes the students to spend more time looking at their computer screen as opposed to looking at me and hearing what I’m saying, or having interactions with their classmates. School is a place for kids to gain social skills through human interaction, not a place for them to sit on a computer and “tweet” all their thoughts and ideas. They can do that at home. School is a place for students to come and learn how to speak and communicate their thoughts well. It’s a place for them to have real interactions and conversations with people.

It’s the teacher’s job to find interactions that have meaning, and teach the student to focus on that. If the student is too busy with technology, their interaction with the other students and the teacher suffers.

A conversation takes both time and effort. A good conversation requires skills. One needs to learn the ability to stop and listen to people. Students must learn to acknowledge what the other says, and to respond in an articulate way. When someone is over connected, and is having broken conversations through texting, twitter, facebook, or blogging, they end up with superfluous connections. If you have fewer contacts throughout the day, those contacts are more meaningful, and obtain more content. Our body can only take in so much stimulation. If a person is over stimulated he cannot function well. Physiologically, for a neuron to function well it has to be able to inhibit its input. If a neuron takes on too much stimulation it cannot function. To function properly it needs to receive information in small, meaningful pieces, otherwise, if it has stimuli overload, much of the information coming in has to be thrown out. If there is too much quantity, quality suffers. How can we expect students to juggle so many things, and deal with so many interactions (twitter, blogging, facebook, face-to-face) and still maintain good quality in each interaction?

Hadley Ferguson states, “The wonderful thing about Twitter is that you can follow people and not say a word… you can spend hours a day lurking without tweeting anything.” Ok, besides the fact that lurking on twitter for hours sounds like an unproductive waste of my day, this also strikes me as a bit creepy. Granted, the person tweeting is allowing his information to be seen by everyone, which is all well and good if that’s what he wants, but why would I sit there silent and read about what someone else is doing with their day? This seems to be a potential culprit for both procrastination and time wasting.

Going along with the creepiness of lurking on twitter, comes the part in the article where Ferguson discusses the opportunity Twitter gives you to “expose yourself”. In an age where people get more and more concerned about “Big Brother” and speak out in anger at the government for invading our privacy, why would anyone willingly go put up more information about themselves for everyone to see? If it is more privacy that we want, why willingly share more details about your life to complete strangers?

So after reading these articles pertaining to Twitter, where does this leave me? I have not had a change of mind, or come to see Twitter as a useful tool in my educational endeavors. Instead, I see it still as I saw it before... 140 character bursts of unimportant information, just another siren call of distraction.