OK I admit it - I have been playing with Twitter - a bit late in the day, as usual, I know but my first reaction was along the lines of: ‘Who in their right mind would use this and for what?’. It’s a form of Blog concentrate; you can post your activities, no matter how trivial, in 140 character snatches to the web or mobile, as many times as you want throughout the day. Your friends can even be notified on their phones in real time about your pearls of wisdom or inexorable banalities, however you want to look at it. One interesting feature it has, is to transform long web addresses into tiny URLS on the fly. In taking time out to play with it I wondered what it could be used for other than an ephemeral timestamp addendum to your life.

‘Who has the time to do this other than sad uber geeks’, I thought, ‘and why is it so popular?’. Then I got to thinking - how could this be used in a compelling way in education? I remembered reading Henry Jenkins’ explanation of transmedia storytelling recently and things began to brew in my mind. Twitter isn’t just about people jotting down exactly what is happening during their day - it’s also being used by people to adopt playful and mischievous personas that comment wryly on life. It’s also being rapidly mashed up with various other web 2.0 tools so that maps, photos, videos, other sources of interlinked information are able to be patched into the streamofconsciousness babble widgit.

Talking about this with a friend I described how, perhaps, it could be used to map and model the progress of characters in James Joyce’s Wandering Rocks episode out of Ulysses. She pointed me to other multi-faceted art forms, notably the movie Timecode and the intriguing play Tamara but if you want something closer to home just think LOST. The BBC started along these lines with CDX last year but the ‘real life’ elements weren’t really plumbed in apart from the odd use of Flickr clues. A more compelling, and sophisticated, example is the PS3 launch campaign- This is Living Site - which even has a foray into Second Life…

Now what if you were to code a set of interlinked, carefully timed, comments from dramatis personae that would post out over Twitter for the period of, let’s say, a couple of days. They could be historical or literary figures and linked geographically and chronologically by something like Google’s MyMaps, and online resources such as Flickr, Odeo, Screencasting and YouTube. Students would be encouraged to join a group and see the narrative and clues evolve over time - perhaps even be linked in by GPS if the narrative is set in a real geographical location. All the time they would be able to share insights and findings with each other, dynamically knowledge building as they progress through the stream - a kind of virtual educational orienteering. Well it’s just a thought - it would be fun to map out and design such a game and drop it like a creative virtual patina over the educational landscape.

What elements would you use as a teacher to mashup such a resource and how would you plan it in such a way as to elicit insights, model narrative structure and foster group working over distance and determine outcomes and assessment? Twitter’s strength is that it easily joins people rather than organisations - perfect for use in schools!? The apps are there - we just need to start using them creatively enough. Twitter could be ingeniously used and subverted in many more ways - it just takes time for these ideas to evolve; what might, at first, seem a trivial waste of time but, if given time, may turn out to be a valuable educational resource…

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 12:21 am and is filed under distributed resource, general ramblings, innovation, knowledge building, mobile, real to virtual, schools, teaching with games, ubicomp, wifi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.