Twitter Experience

My experience using twitter was similar to when I tried to run a personal twitter account. I will admit that this was slightly more pleasant in that I already had a pre set group of people to follow and follow me, so I didn't have to just go try to click on random people who would have no idea who I was, and some ideas for things to post. But I still really couldn't get into it because, for me, 140 characters is way too little to say anything useful. Come on, I am an English teacher. I am incredibly verbose. I am also a novelist and my favorite writing models are the ones who are extremely wordy. I honestly don't care about plot when I read. Hundreds of pages of nothing but beautiful description will make me contented and happy as a clam. Anyway, the point here is that for me, trying to write on twitter feels like wearing a straight-jacket. It's not enjoyable at all because I feel I have to turn out an inferior product in order to fit the site's arbitrary rules. Anything I post, I always think how I could have made it better if I'd gone on for another two or three paragraphs. Another thing that really bothers me about twitter is that you can't reply directly to something someone else has said (I use the term “said” loosely considering the character limit). You have to post something in your own feed referencing their comment, which makes it impossible, at least for me, to construct anything like a coherent conversation. Ideas should flow like a good essay, with each point connected to the previous one, even if multiple people are talking. This doesn't work if the ideas are on completely different pages so the participants must hunt for them. In fact, the participants many not even all be aware of each others existence or have access to each others contributions. If someone posted something in response to a comment you're reading, but you're not following that person, you may never know there's a whole different section of the conversation going on. As far as its usefulness in education, I think twitter would be more trouble than it's worth for the reasons I explain above. I would much prefer using a traditional forum or even a blog, where responses can be directly linked to the original post and where there is no character limit. In my eyes, these type of sites have all the advantages of twitter with none of the disadvantages.

And here are some more negative things I wrote about twitter in one of my discussion posts

Do you feel that social networking tools, when used in education, will improve interaction between students?  Between the instructor and students?  Give some specific examples of tools that might improve each of these types of interaction.

I actually think social networking would make communication more difficult when compared to, say, a discussion board. The reason for this is that instructor and students will have to move from web-page to web-page, to find out what each student thinks, instead of having all the material gathered together in one place. For most of my classes students submit their assignments as threads in a discussion board and the other students join the “conversation” by posting responses to the thread. In one class almost all of the assignments are posted in private research journals and I find this much less pleasant and effective because I have to visit each journal individually to read and comment on each assignment. Not only does this make grading take much longer but the dynamic back and forth of the the discussion board, one of my favorite things about online classes, is lost.
If each student had to post up their paper on their Face book page (for example) and other students would have to visit each page to read and comment on the papers, I would be concerned that they would not make the effort to comment on as many papers as it takes a lot more effort (at least mentally) to go to a new web-page than to more to a new discussion thread in the same forum. The other thing that I feel is lost here is the idea of the entire assignment as a whole. Even though each thread in a discussion is an individual conversation, in a forum, different threads can interact with each other. For example, I or another student can refer in one thread to some thing that was discussed in another thread or, if someone gives one student a suggestion a suggestion for avoiding run-on sentences, other students with the same problem can also read and benefit from it. I'm not saying these things couldn't happen on social networking pages, but I do think it would be more difficult see and make use of connections since the conversations are more spread out.
Another issue with communication on social networking sites is privacy in that these sites are not created and administered by the educational institution, unlike a traditional online course. I know that I'm finding myself being more wary about what I post in my blog or twitter feed that I would be about posting in a course forum because I know this material would be available to people outside the course. Yes, I realize most of these sites have privacy settings but this is still problematic. Each student will have to personally “friend” every single other student in the course to get them past the privacy settings. In a learning management system like blackboard this is done automatically by the software when the student registers. What if student conflict develops? Instead of coming to the instructor, students may take matters into their own hands, un-friending each other and thereby depriving the disliked student of participating in discussions (and the points for doing so). Students could hide or delete posts they don't like on their pages which, again would give them the power to deprive others of grades.
Finally, what happens at the end of the semester? If one teacher is using Face book for a class, it is safe to assume others are doing so as well and most of these social networking sites only allow one site per email address (My personal twitter account was bound to my primary email so I had to scrounge for a second email to make my course site on). Since there is a limit to the number of such sites a student can make they may end up having to double up, using the same site for multiple courses, which means potentially confidential information will then become available to students who weren't even in the original course—unless the student takes the time to manually delete or hide all material from a previous courses (Needless to say, the instructor using these sites, faces the same issue on a far greater scale). There is also the issue that a student can freely change their privacy settings during or after a course without the instructor knowing or being able to do anything about it. In my own classes, I feel free to say whatever I want in the understanding that “what happened on blackboard stays on blackboard.” A student's face book page may be set to private when I write something but, at a latter date it may not become private which could cause all kinds of problems. (Incidentally, these problems become even bigger when a student or instructor is trying to manage material for multiple courses on social networking sites at the same time).
I realize I did sort of the opposite of the question above by writing about how social networking could limit communication rather than enhance it. In my defense I simply what to say that I've used social networking extensively in my personal life (I have multiple accounts on My Space, Face book, and Twitter as well as some more obscure sites, like a social networking site specifically for belly-dancers, so I'm not someone who decided to bash this stuff without even giving it a try) and I've hated all of it. From my experience, these sites simply do not work to establish any kind of connection between people and every time I try I feel like I'm going to go crazy.
PS. A final barrier to communication on social networking sites is that they may prove distracting to students. If a student is already on Face book it becomes much more tempting to chat with their other friends on the site than to go comment on a classmate's paper. Even if this only happens once it awhile, it will still reduce the number of comments in the discussion, which is never a good thing.