Ice Breaker -Your homework assignment is to use and become familiar with your classmates through Twitter. (See below for some additional Twitter info, but post (tweet) at least 10 times over the weekend.) You should also read How Twittering Creates a Social Sixth Sense Clive Thompson, from Wired and Friends Swap Twitters and Frustration&Wall Street Journal. These are both short and should only take you 15 minutes to read. If you are looking for classmates to follow you should go to my Twitter profile and add in some of your classmates. You don’t necessarily need to follow everyone in the class but add in at least ten to get the Twitter experience. You can also choose to follow people who are not in our class. There are several personalities on Twitter if you would like to follow them. Barack Obama or John Edwards for example, if you find others leave them in the comments. Two other notes on Twitter. To make you Twitter experience better you should get a Twitter client for your computer or perhaps integrate it with your Facebook page. Finally, note that if you want to block people or make your tweets (posts) private Twitter enables this function.
(source: http://outsidethetext.com/trace/38/)
Track a Word: Through Twitter you can “track” a word. This will subscribe you to any post which contains said word. So, for example a student could be interested in how a particular word is used. They can track the word, and see the varied phrases in which people use it. Or, you can track an event, a proper name (I track Derrida for example), a movie title, a store name see how many people a day tweet that they are at or on their way to a Starbucks. (To do this send the message “track Starbucks” to Twitter, rather than posting the update “track Starbucks” you will now receive all messages with the word “Starbucks.”)
Classroom Community: Once students started twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half. This carried with it a range of benefits, from more productive classroom conversations (people were more willing to talk, and more respectful of others), and also helped me to understand what type of students they were.
Get a Sense of the World: You can have students look at the Public Timeline of Twitter. This is the place where all public messages get posted. The “noise” ratio here is pretty high, but one gets a sense of how varied are the things people are doing around the globe. Just a quick look at the timeline shows a range of languages, although English is still the predominate one. Additionally the public timeline serves as a sort of quick measure of what people are paying attention to.
Follow a Professional: Students can follow someone else who is on Twitter, who interests them. Grammar: Surprisingly Twitter is actually good for teaching grammar. Why? Because of its short form those who tweet often abbreviate and abuse grammar rules, developing their own unique “twitter rules.” This helps to demonstrate, both how all communication needs rules/structure and how important something like a comma or a period can be. (Some Tweets become really ambiguous because of their lack of punctuation.)
Maximizing the Teachable Moment: It is often hard to teach in context, Twitter allows you to do this, but better yet, allows your students to do it for you (a way that others will hear perhaps).
Public NotePad: Twitter is really good for sharing short inspirations, thoughts that just popped into your head. Not only are they recorded, because you can go back and look at them, but you can also get inspiration from others. This is really useful for any “creative” based class.
(source: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/ )
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