Lately I've been skeptically musing over the academic and professional value of Twitter. What exactly is the educational value of a 140 character message? The Twitter Book has me convinced it's time to dive in...

It's deceptively simple, really: Send a short message (140 characters max), from your cell phone or web-connected computer. Anyone "following" you will see your message. One way to imagine it, I suppose, is to compare it to those annoying banners that go flying by at the bottom of your television screen while you watch the news. But O'Reilly and Milstein point out that the "news feed" analogy is short-sighted - it's really more about conversation and collaboration.

So when is real-time information and sharing like this valuable in a learning setting? Aside from the obvious "instructors sharing tips with one another", I'm already uncovering some interesting example of educational "tweeting":

•  Opening a new "channel" for student participation. One example is The Twitter Experiment from Dr. Monica Rankin, Professor of History at the University of Texas in Dallas (her 5 minute video is embedded below):
  
  
• Large classroom (or conference) Q&A. I've seen this at education conferences - it's very engaging and makes the post-keynote Q&A much more lively
• Support real-time collaboration among a group of students (during field trips, on scavenger hunts, etc)

So, I've decided jump into the twitter-sphere (or whatever it's being called!). I'm not sure what exactly will happen, but I'm sure it will be an adventure. If you'd like to follow my adventure, feel free to set up your own twitter account and then "follow" me (http://twitter.com/jgvanides).

I'm sure there are many more ideas out there for using twitter to support teaching and learning. If you know of some, feel free to send me a "tweet" @jgvanides...!

Jim Vanides, B.S.M.E, M.Ed.
Worldwide Education Programs
HP Global Social Investment
Hewlett-Packard
Twitter @jgvanides

For information about the HP Global Social Investments, visit www.hp.com/hpinfo/grants