Twitter Makes the "P" in PD Powerful, Personal, and Progressive

A 2010 Rutgers University study found that 80% of tweeters use Twitter to update others on their status or share their thoughts and observations and deemed such users “meformers”.  I’ll admit that two weeks ago this was my perception of Twitter – that it was a one-way method of conversation for Narcissists and/or people with far too much time on their hands.  In contrast, a recent Drexel University study found that only 2.5% of tweets by educators contain personal information.  Rather, as I have discovered, teachers are "informers".  You share resources, pose and respond to questions, and learn about innovative programs, technologies, practices, and research. In many ways, Twitter is a natural extension of what teachers do in the classroom – modeling the behaviors and skills you want to see in your students (information literacy, communication and collaboration, safe social networking, and lifelong learning, among others).

I recently posted a comment on Michael Pershan’s (@mpershan) Rational Expressions blog that included my view that mathematics education is more about the process than the product.  Twitter fits into this philosophy too – it transforms professional development from being a single event with a specific focus into a continual conversation with limitless possibilities.  Twitter allows educators to maintain connections with people you meet at conferences and workshops, college and graduate school classmates, and former colleagues in a way that is different than email due to its more open nature (more about this will be coming in another post) and 140-character limit.   (Sadly, I searched for over 25 such contacts and was only able to find one who has a Twitter account.)

In addition, though, Twitter also offers a way for teachers to expand your professional network.  You can choose to follow people with whom you share a specific experience, interest and/or goal (more about the mechanics of how to do this will be coming in another post) as I did with Beth Gryczewski (@Gryczewski).  The exciting part is that in doing so you often discover conversations and blogs that introduce novel topics or ideas that will make you pause to reflect and perhaps even act.  For example, Beth recommended that I join the #21stedchat Twitter chat last Sunday. (For anyone who is unfamiliar with a Twitter chat, it is simply a synchronous, public conversation held on Twitter at a designated time and threaded together with a common hashtag.  Here is a list of all of the educational chats on Twitter thanks to Jerry Blumengarten (@cybraryman1)).  The topic was "Professional Development for 21st Century Learning".  Participating exposed my tweets to the people interacting with me in addition to my followers and brought professional development opportunities to my attention that I most likely would have never found on my own (Internet searches tend to be most fruitful when you have something particular you are looking for).  I was unaware of the existence of #edcamps prior to the chat and now I am trying to convince The Math Forum (@themathforum) to host a math-specific one. 

Is anybody listening – oh, oh / No reply at all…

The Math Forum (@themathforum) sent out a tweet the other day about You Tube’s search for the Next EDU Gurus.  I did a decent amount of work with vodcasting while a student in Drexel’s Master of Science in Mathematics Learning and Teaching Program so I was excited to see what the contest was all about.  Unfortunately, after reading the details my excitement grew into frustration.  Despite being popular, flipped classrooms that introduce content at home to allow more in-class interaction do not always actively engage students in problem solving or critical thinking.  While the examples that YouTube provided (setting historical events to music, doodling geometry, and singing Shakespeare) might be as they say “compelling” I don’t see how they provide students with rich and authentic out-of-class learning experiences.  What does this have to do with Twitter you might be asking?  I remember watching an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians  last year (go ahead and pass judgment, but – as Matt Labash observed – even the most intellectual television shows aren’t much more intellectual than the middle schoolers I used to teach) where Kim got into a Twitter war with her friend Jonathan Cheban and I was afraid of starting my own battle.

I personally do not feel that Sal Khan is an EDU Guru.  There is no doubt that he is a business guru – in six years he grew his “classroom” from a few hundred students to more than 4 million per month – and even a technology guru – his videos are at the heart of the online education trend (which I am a big proponent of considering that I completed my entire master’s degree online).  However, in my opinion, the Khan Academy videos promote what a former colleague of mine referred to as memorizing for the moment instead of learning for a lifetime.  It just took me over 500 characters to say that.  On Twitter, I would have written “@themathforum It’s unfortunate that Khan is a judge-his videos are nothing more than tech-enhanced versions of the lectures I got in school”.  While both versions boil down to the same thing, the second is far more inflammatory because I am able to give my opinion but not explain it.  Not yet sure of many of Twitter’s social norms (which I hope people will help me learn by commenting on this blog) I was afraid that I might make enemies before people really knew anything about me.  So instead I wrote, “@themathforum Wondering what others think of YouTube’s examples of ‘great educational content’”.

In the end, it didn’t matter what I wrote because I got no replies.  At first I was extremely disappointed.  I believed that I had posed a thoughtful question that people would want to share their opinions on, but not fight about.  Perhaps I was wrong, but I think the larger issue is that my tweet was only seen by four people.  It turns out that when you start a tweet with a username only that person and people who are following both you and that person see it.  Notwithstanding sending a direct message, a reply is the most “private” form of tweeting aside from actually making your tweets private.  If you want to reach users that aren’t following you, but received the tweet that you are commenting on you need to reference it instead of replying to it.  There are several ways to do this:

• Put a period in front of the username you are replying to (.@themathforum Wondering what others think of YouTube’s examples of “great educational content”)
• Place the username you are replying to somewhere in the tweet other than at the beginning (Wondering what others @themathforum think of YouTube’s examples of “great educational content”)