segunda-feira, março 09, 2009
sábado, março 07, 2009
O porquê do sucesso do Twitter
Usamos o Twitter porque esperamos uma resposta!!!!
I’ve invited you to experiment with Twitter to give you practice in using English, to introduce the use of enhanced group communications for learning, to help prepare you for the rich and demanding communications contexts you will likely confront in the workplace, and because Twitter can help build supportive community and is fun!
Many of you have responded vigorously and well, and it has been just wonderful to see all that English being put to good use! As we discussed in some detail last week, and which I will review here, you have been using Twitter to ask and answer questions, to offer observations and express feelings, to respond to the observations and feelings of others, to share sources and links, to plan and organize activities, and to comment on all of the above.
I’d like you to think about adding some comments on your use of Twitter to your Final Presentations in the next two weeks, addressing the question of how you learned how to use Twitter to your advantage, including, how it contributed to your learning and use of English, to the development of your communications skills, to your other academic work, and to the communications among friends and community.
I’m also writing this up for my other friends in the e-learning business as I think what you are doing is exemplary and will offer them a helpful case study. So, after outlining what you’ve done and might do next, I’ll talk about the curious and maybe unique place such uses of Twitter may have in using such technologies in the classroom. I put it here so you might see a little bit of the larger picture, know a bit better why your achievement is of some significance, and maybe offer you a chance to develop your understanding in greater depth. I’m also essentially outlining how one might go about developing a more comprehensive study of twittering, because the brevity of the form and precise dating and linking would lend themselves to a detailed analysis of group interactions. I hesitate to spell it out like this here, because in part in choosing our followers allows us to enjoy the feeling of a protected space, but as we discussed from the outset, all of this is public and writing in public is an essential part of what this “many-to-many” is all about.
How You Might Evaluate Your Twitter Use
As we have discussed, evaluations can take many forms and suit different purposes. So far, we have distinguished between “summative” evaluations, such as grades after an exam or end of course which you have merely to accept, and “formative” evaluations, including comments and quizzes which you can talk about to help evaluate what you’ve done and to the end of improving teaching and learning. The analysis which follows is intended to be of the “formative” kind, offering you advice on how to learn what some have done and what you might do and understand this activity’s meaning and significance.
As we discussed in class last week, one way to understand what we are doing is to conduct a content analysis of your posts, whereby you print out all of your Twitter posts, “score” individual posts against meaningful categories, and then stand back and observe how these posts may have contributed to your work and how you have learned how to use them, which likely involves examining how the content of these posts has changed over time.
The content analysis proceeds by “scoring” each post against meaningful categories, high-level generalizations, which allow us to assign them meaning and then view them in patterns. We started with Manon’s recent posts, beginning with the following:
For this post, we noted that the “@sysyphos” tag means that she is responding to another user (and by putting it in this way, with the “@” sign, means he will see it as a “reply”), and we noted that it takes the form of asking a question, so we called it a “query”.
From there we discussed its qualities, or “attributes”, and noting the word “please” we scored it as “friendly”, or “a friendly query.”
We discussed as well how the subject of movie-going was different from the many posts relating to our academic work, so we added “free time”.
And we then had a lot of fun tagging the last sentence, “I would like to see it, too,” as we saw this “expressing a wish,” “asking for an invitation,” and our favorite, “hitting on Andreas”!
Having Our Fun and Eating It, Too
As often in this class, we did our best to do our work with great humor while keeping the academic dimensions in mind and considering how these posts contribute to our work. We discussed how such exchanges signaled the building of a relationship that we expected might eventually lead to academic discussions or arrangements to meet where academic discussion might go on: that as we are working together the “trivial” aspect was likely one step away from more serious things.
We noted how this business of creating categories and tagging is not peculiar to the web, but is part of the much more general problem of finding or generating good keywords, titles, sub-titles, etc., and that this is part of the problem of developing generalizations, hierarchies, logic, transitions, understanding, etc. — that in such scoring we were practicing our English in a potentially sophisticated way: that for us, every exchange, including the presumably superficial, offered significant potential for practice.
Thus, we discussed, with much laughter, how the category of “hitting on Andreas” led us to consider the problems of irony, which we defined as suggesting something other than what you say, and we discussed the sending of mixed messages and problems of ambiguity.
Maybe Sharing, Insider Knowledge
This prepared us for the second entry, which we characterized as a “response”, but whose content was likely “insider knowledge.” We also discussed the problem of broadcasting “insider knowledge”, because as soon as we begin talking about things not everyone knows about — that we often send messages addressed and relevant to less than all of our “followers” — we are often dealing with problems of including and excluding others.
As we noted at another time, when a larger group is presented with seemingly obscure references, their response may well be: “what is this about?”, and as the group is open, others may see themselves as being invited to join in … just like life! We did not judge this as “good” or “bad”, but simply noted the action and implications and set this against posts that are easier for others in the group to understand and that may even invite others, including those not directly addressed, to respond. But not all posts call for responses.
I’ve invited you to experiment with Twitter to give you practice in using English, to introduce the use of enhanced group communications for learning, to help prepare you for the rich and demanding communications contexts you will likely confront in the workplace, and because Twitter can help build supportive community and is fun!
Many of you have responded vigorously and well, and it has been just wonderful to see all that English being put to good use! As we discussed in some detail last week, and which I will review here, you have been using Twitter to ask and answer questions, to offer observations and express feelings, to respond to the observations and feelings of others, to share sources and links, to plan and organize activities, and to comment on all of the above.
I’d like you to think about adding some comments on your use of Twitter to your Final Presentations in the next two weeks, addressing the question of how you learned how to use Twitter to your advantage, including, how it contributed to your learning and use of English, to the development of your communications skills, to your other academic work, and to the communications among friends and community.
I’m also writing this up for my other friends in the e-learning business as I think what you are doing is exemplary and will offer them a helpful case study. So, after outlining what you’ve done and might do next, I’ll talk about the curious and maybe unique place such uses of Twitter may have in using such technologies in the classroom. I put it here so you might see a little bit of the larger picture, know a bit better why your achievement is of some significance, and maybe offer you a chance to develop your understanding in greater depth. I’m also essentially outlining how one might go about developing a more comprehensive study of twittering, because the brevity of the form and precise dating and linking would lend themselves to a detailed analysis of group interactions. I hesitate to spell it out like this here, because in part in choosing our followers allows us to enjoy the feeling of a protected space, but as we discussed from the outset, all of this is public and writing in public is an essential part of what this “many-to-many” is all about.
How You Might Evaluate Your Twitter Use
As we have discussed, evaluations can take many forms and suit different purposes. So far, we have distinguished between “summative” evaluations, such as grades after an exam or end of course which you have merely to accept, and “formative” evaluations, including comments and quizzes which you can talk about to help evaluate what you’ve done and to the end of improving teaching and learning. The analysis which follows is intended to be of the “formative” kind, offering you advice on how to learn what some have done and what you might do and understand this activity’s meaning and significance.
As we discussed in class last week, one way to understand what we are doing is to conduct a content analysis of your posts, whereby you print out all of your Twitter posts, “score” individual posts against meaningful categories, and then stand back and observe how these posts may have contributed to your work and how you have learned how to use them, which likely involves examining how the content of these posts has changed over time.
The content analysis proceeds by “scoring” each post against meaningful categories, high-level generalizations, which allow us to assign them meaning and then view them in patterns. We started with Manon’s recent posts, beginning with the following:
For this post, we noted that the “@sysyphos” tag means that she is responding to another user (and by putting it in this way, with the “@” sign, means he will see it as a “reply”), and we noted that it takes the form of asking a question, so we called it a “query”.
From there we discussed its qualities, or “attributes”, and noting the word “please” we scored it as “friendly”, or “a friendly query.”
We discussed as well how the subject of movie-going was different from the many posts relating to our academic work, so we added “free time”.
And we then had a lot of fun tagging the last sentence, “I would like to see it, too,” as we saw this “expressing a wish,” “asking for an invitation,” and our favorite, “hitting on Andreas”!
Having Our Fun and Eating It, Too
As often in this class, we did our best to do our work with great humor while keeping the academic dimensions in mind and considering how these posts contribute to our work. We discussed how such exchanges signaled the building of a relationship that we expected might eventually lead to academic discussions or arrangements to meet where academic discussion might go on: that as we are working together the “trivial” aspect was likely one step away from more serious things.
We noted how this business of creating categories and tagging is not peculiar to the web, but is part of the much more general problem of finding or generating good keywords, titles, sub-titles, etc., and that this is part of the problem of developing generalizations, hierarchies, logic, transitions, understanding, etc. — that in such scoring we were practicing our English in a potentially sophisticated way: that for us, every exchange, including the presumably superficial, offered significant potential for practice.
Thus, we discussed, with much laughter, how the category of “hitting on Andreas” led us to consider the problems of irony, which we defined as suggesting something other than what you say, and we discussed the sending of mixed messages and problems of ambiguity.
Maybe Sharing, Insider Knowledge
This prepared us for the second entry, which we characterized as a “response”, but whose content was likely “insider knowledge.” We also discussed the problem of broadcasting “insider knowledge”, because as soon as we begin talking about things not everyone knows about — that we often send messages addressed and relevant to less than all of our “followers” — we are often dealing with problems of including and excluding others.
As we noted at another time, when a larger group is presented with seemingly obscure references, their response may well be: “what is this about?”, and as the group is open, others may see themselves as being invited to join in … just like life! We did not judge this as “good” or “bad”, but simply noted the action and implications and set this against posts that are easier for others in the group to understand and that may even invite others, including those not directly addressed, to respond. But not all posts call for responses.
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