Twitter is known as a “micro-blogging” site, in the sense that communication through Twitter is restricted to 140 character “tweets”.  Probably as a result of this slightly unusual nature, it is rarely adopted in a teaching framework, but that doesn’t mean that there are not opportunities to use the platform to help students.  Uptake has not been helped by the fact that a relatively small minority of academics are currently using the service, meaning that there is a lack of familiarity.  There is also some jargon that you will needto be familiar with to interactthrough this medium:

• Hashtags – these are tags denoted by the “#” character that group tweets according to particular topics.  For example, a recently published paper on avian phylogenies might be tagged as #bird #evolution.  This makes it easier for users to find and share relevant content.
• Retweets – rather than generating all of your own content on Twitter, it is common practice to spread the content created by others.  If someone has posted something you found interesting, you can retweet (designated “RT” within the tweet) to push that back out to your followers.
• Followers – the people who subscribe to tweets from your account are known as “followers” and you will see the option to “follow” other users on Twitter.  This is the audience for your tweets.

The good thing about Twitter is that there is a lot of information. The bad thing about Twitter is that there is a lot of information. Using Twitter effectively means being able to take what you can from the stream of data without feeling too bad about letting a lot of it slide past. This can be helped by managing lists of users of particular interest, and by using programmes that interface with Twitter, such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.

As part of a tutorial on research methods, a class of eight second year undergraduates are given the table of contents to three leading ecology journals from the past few weeks and are told to find a paper that they are interested in and engage with one of the authors on Twitter.  The exchange should involve questions related to the content of the paper or the authors’ similar work and should fit the format of the medium (140 characters).  The students should submit the Twitter exchange, along with a reflection on the experience and the information that was gathered, as an assignment for marking.  This kind of activity helps the student explore a medium of communication that is rarely emphasised within university education, as well as developing their online personae and potentially networking with important researchers.

Also think about:

• Using Twitter as a communication tool with the rest of the class (e.g. posting assignment deadlines)
• Using Twitter in-class, by incorporating a Twitter stream on a screen while teaching.  Students can then interact in real-time.