ARTICLES,
REVIEWS,
ESSAYS,
& PRESENTATIONS
on TEACHING ENGLISH
ARTICLES,
REVIEWS,
ESSAYS,
& PRESENTATIONS
on TEACHING ENGLISH 
If you aren't familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is. Eric Nuzum
Advancements in always-on communication technology can make traditional educators uncomfortable, the ones who worry about the debasement of rhetorical modes and insist that a thesis belongs in the first paragraph, who bristle at jargon in timed essays, who think that MySpace, instant-messaging, blogs, and other quickly adopted technologies undermine the mother tongue. Traditional teachers may find even more reason to panic with the recent introduction of micro-blogging, short on-line posts that operate in a closed self-selected and interactive community. “Yeah, they [teachers] think they can stop us,” writes one student to another using the free Twitter micro-blogging platform. His message to traditional language arts teachers is unequivocal: your authority is already undermined.
What is Micro-blogging?
Micro-blogging, mini-blogging, and tumble-blogging are variations of web logging that encourage short, mixed-media posts. The format was popularized by Twitter, a creation that entered the blogosphere in March of 2006 by Obvious Corp. Members of the service post updates to a Twitter web site via a desktop service, phone, or through an instant message client (TechTarget, 2006) and describe what they are doing or thinking in under 140 characters.
Go ahead, post the most inane thoughts. Grammar and punctuation are optional,
but keep it short. The following is an annotated list of the most popular
services.
· Pownce (Megatechtronium, 2007) allows you to send links, videos, and other types of files to anyone on your network. Powncers tend to share more on-line content. I use this service several times a day. Link: http//:www.pownce.com.
· Jaiku (2007) uses threaded conversations to post users’ entire “life stream” to combine feeds from multiple blogs, on-line photo albums, news, etc. This service is not as viral as the previous two. Link: http://www.jaiku.com.
· Tumblr (2007) has the most intuitive and customizable interface of the bunch. Send videos and links or import RSS feeds. The comment function is not as developed as the other services. Link: http://www.tumblr.com
· Twitter (Twitter Development Talk Google Group, 2007), the most popular mini-blog tool, limits the user to 140 characters. You can holler to friends with the “@username” convention. The design is ugly, but can be modified using external APIs. Link: http://www.twitter.com
Each tool is free, unless you upgrade to the professional versions that offer larger attachments and customizable themes. HelloTxt (2007) allows you to broadcast your status to multiple micro-blogging services simultaneously. New tools keep appearing. Even technology geeks can be confused about what micro-blogging communication service to use. So many choices may influence some users to think of these tools as disposable. My thirteen-year-old daughter joined Twitter, but then abandoned micro-blogging completely after a week. Her on-line social time is currently spent using AIM instant messaging and MySpace. Maybe she just doesn’t want to occupy the same social space as her father and his old friends. Doc Searls, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (Locke, Levine, Searls, & Weinberger, 2001) argues that walled communities like Twitter and Facebook are helpful, but not actually social, like the “Elks Club” (Ochman, B.L. , 2007). One senses that his main objection is that the community is situated within a corporate space. “It’s a waste of time,” my wife complained. “Who cares that I’m about to forward the laundry? Why not just talk to people?” She raises a good point. Why micro-blog when you can speed dial a pal and meet over blended coffee beverages?
One answer is that micro-blogging lowers the threat of rejection. Because my posts are asynchronous, there is no danger of interrupting or inconveniencing peers. Also, with little effort, I can learn about friends’ mountain meditations, pre-GRE angst, or napping habits. My Pownce family pouts and worries and shouts out their triumphs. “My lesson rocked!” is a common expression among my teacher-dominated community. There is an intimacy in knowing that my friend in Charlotte just sat down with bad coffee, or that a colleague is struggling to write an article on deadline. The connections might be virtual, but they feel real.
The Virus Spreads
My
introduction to Twitter occurred almost a year ago during the Tar River Writing
Project Summer Institute, held at East Carolina University in Greenville, North
Carolina. Half of the 10 participants micro-blogged madly all day long. When
members of the Charlotte Writing Project visited our site, our social network
went viral; the number of users quickly expanded, or scaled,
exponentially across the state. Now the core micro-bloggers in my network are
authors, researchers, graduate students, professors, and teachers. Some describe
our new network as “sacred space.” And even though I am an excruciatingly dull
and introverted family guy, I have bonded with my twenty-two member Pownce
community. Wrote one of my colleagues,
I'm diving back into this seriously blocked piece. I'm hearing [Tillia’s] montra (sic) . . . 600 words. I'm hearing Todd, 1 hour to write. I'm hearing [Mark] breathe in, breathe out. I'm hearing all of your words of disiplin and encouragement. THANKS!!!!
Inexplicably, these connections make me happy. Indeed, my community empowers me
to write more and be a better teacher. But it’s not all free love and tie-dye.
Having too many friends on-line is like living in the O.C. As
friendships subtly shift within the space, jealousy can result. Also, is a
colleague a trusted friend? What about his boss? What if the “cool group”
abandons Twitter for Pownce, like my group did? Who gets left on the old
island? This month, a geek from New Zealand and a Pennsylvania graduate student
requested to “friend me” in the argot of Pownce. I erased both from my community
as cool as an assassin. They are forever blocked from my micro-blogging world. I
would like to be more conflicted about erasing virtual acquaintances, but in
fact, it feels empowering. Writes danah boyd on her wonkish social network blog,
Apophenia,
If there are 10 friends, and each of them ends up liking the 1 different feature in each of the 10 hypothetical services, you have a problem. These me-too services have caused users to have fragmented networks and force them to either sign up and manage multiple accounts, lose touch with their friends on other networks, or resort to third-party tools to aggregate and mass-post information to all the networks (Saleem, 2007).
Even virtual network junkies like my teenage daughter struggle to balance their friendships. After pretending to be a lesbian, Rachel was banned “for life” from one Disney site targeted at young adults. “It was boring, anyway,” she claimed. I suspect that Rachel unconsciously sabotaged her membership in order to reduce her social load. Like her dad, on-line “fratricide” will become a way of life.
With my Pownce network growing, I have begun to categorize my community members
into “trusted friends” and “friends”. However, such labels become complicated
fast. I'm not sure I have the courage to tell someone I know that they can't
join my friend group when they ask. I also worry about participating in a
social network that, arguably, gains status by excluding others. I predict
that, inevitably, my close-knit community will feel less like the Navy Seals and
more like the Navy. And that’s okay. My Pownce group is too white, too
educated, too liberal, and too heterosexual. There is some racial, religious,
political, gender, and age diversification, but not enough. Unlike my fellow
“Powncers” who feel apprehensive about how growth will change the forum, the
emotional stakes for me are lower. I rarely use the forum to post when I’m
depressed or to report on my various ailments, but that might be a product of my
maleness, rather than my interpretation of Pownce norms.
Should English Teachers Integrate Micro-blogging into their Classes?
Several English teachers on the blogosphere discuss how they have tested micro-blogging with their students, using it to annotated classroom discussions, as one example. But, the trend of using Web 2.0 technologies to jazz up Classroom 1.0 curricula troubles me. It is too easy to misunderstand the complicated rhetorical negotiation and representations that micro-bloggers use—the instant decision-making and professional-personal boundary conflation that make these tools so appealing, immediate, and satisfying. Shouldn’t teachers honor these spaces where adolescents are the acknowledged experts?
Rather than co-opting these emerging literacies, one alternative is tasking students with researching their own on-line literacy practices in order to enhance their understanding of technology-enabled communication. Developing a media lab to study these new spaces would help teachers and students understand digital networks, the nature of virtual relationships, and how different micro-blogs privilege specific kinds of rhetorical moves over others. How do participants organize ideas? Represent themselves? Create connections? What language is privileged and why? What are the implications for students’ changing world view? These multiple literacies can be examined “around the clock” (Ganley, 2006) as a way for teens to understand the subtle art of context management.
Learning the explicit conventions of micro-blogging is a good first step for most classrooms. Meanwhile, I have learned much from my interactions on Pownce and Twitter. I’ve learned that more data is not value-add without time to process or act on that information, and that walled-garden communication can be enormously satisfying. As social networks become more sophisticated, tools will inevitably be introduced that help us determine who to trust and in what contexts without needing to look an actual person in the eye. Because on-line social networks are still in their infancy, and the technology is changing fast, these principles will inevitably change. Perhaps adolescents can help us understand what these presence-forwarding tools suggest about 21st century literacies.
References
boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11.
Ganley, B. (2006, July 6). bgblogging: Creativity and Community in a Web 2.0 Classroom--Not As Easy As It Sounds?. Movable Type at Middlebury College. Retrieved Novemeber 12, 2007, from http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/2006/08/creativity_and_community_in_a.html.
HelloTxt (2007). HelloTxt, Retrived March 7, 2008.
Jaiku. (2007). Jaiku: Your Conversation. Retrieved November 12, 2007 from http://jaiku.com/.
Locke, C., Levine, R., Searls, D., & Weinberger, D. (2001). The Cluetrain Manifesto. Reading: Perseus Books.
MacManus, R. (2007, September 22). Weekly Wrapup, 17-21 September 2007. Richard MacManus. Retrieved November 12, 2007, from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/weekly_wrapup_17-21_september2007.php
Megatechtronium. (2007). Pownce. Retrieved November 12, 2007, from http://startupsearch.org/company/megatechtronium/product/pownce/
Neisler, J. (2007). Facebook: The Atticus Finch Society. Facebook, Inc. Retrieved November 12, 2007, from http://ecu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4042407484.
Ochman, B.L. (2007) What's Next Blog. Retrieved March 7, 2008 from http://www.whatsnextblog.com/archives/2008/03/top_bloggers_essential_research_tools_how_doc_searls_stays_on_informations.asp.
Saleem, M. (2007, June 31). Me-Too Mentality is Bad for Users, Marketers, and Startups. Retrieved November 24, 2007 from http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/metoo-mentality-is-bad-for-users-marketers-and-startups34452.html
Scoble, R. (2007, September 23). The 10 rules of Twitter (and how I break every one), Scobleizer. Robert Scoble. Retrieved November 12, 2007, from http://scobleizer.com/2007/09/23/the-10-rules-of-twitter-and-how-i-break-every-one/.
TechTarget. (2006, July 26). What is Micro-blogging? - a definition from Whatis.com. Retrieved on November 24, 2007 from http://searchmobilecomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid40_gci1265620,00.html.
Tumblr, Inc. (2007). Tumblr. Retrieved November 12, 2007, from http://www.tumblr.com/.
Twitter Development Talk Google Group. (2007). Twitter: What Are You Doing? Retrieved November 12, 2007, from http://twitter.com/.
Wisdump, Inc. (2007, August 24). Comparing the Top 4 Mini-Blog Options. Retrieved November 12, 2007, from http://wisdump.com/web/comparing-the-top-4-mini-blog-options/.