About Twitter

Twitter is a widely used social networking media that focuses on titles, subtitles and short replies. In my opinion, I think that Twitter is for social purposes, and less on the academic side. There's a bit too much clutter and advertisements that can be way too distracting for a learning environment. Blackboard on the other hand might be a bit more learning friendly. It is straightforward and replies can be posted just as fast as tweets. The down side for a Blackboard discussion is that students would have to manually refresh their webpage every now so often in order to keep up with the most recently added comments on the discussion board. Whereas Twitter, it is manually updated with live information and replies. Another negativity about Twitter is that you are limited to 140 characters per post- that is about two sentences in length. Having a discussion would be difficult if people had to split up their thoughts and post several times back to back in order to voice their opinion. And if another student were to interrupt the flow in between posts with his posts, then it would be hectic to organize posts accordingly. And there is no way to know when someone is about to submit a post.

In class discussions might be the best option in terms of education; I mean, what are schools for right? There's less distraction; getting side tracked on the internet is extremely easy- it's literally a click away. Student activity can be monitored by a teacher, and there wouldn't be students interrupting one another. Some positive aspects about online teaching is that time restraints and meeting areas are a lot more lenient. And perhaps the most influential factor is that the internet is just a click away if you need any fast research on a topic you're unfamiliar with.