Saturday, October 8, 2011

Twitter

HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS   
"TWITTER"   
  
            Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".
           Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."
Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated website, is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston, and New York City.

Creation
         Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability." Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".
"...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was." – Jack Dorsey
          The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets–including Odeo.com and Twitter.com–from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.
Tweet contents
Content of Tweets according to Pear Analytics.
News
Spam
Self-promotion
Pointless babble
Conversational
Pass-along value

            San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:
• Pointless babble – 40%
• Conversational – 38%
• Pass-along value – 9%
• Self-promotion – 6%
• Spam – 4%
• News – 4%
            Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want[ing] to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable").

In Education
            The Distance College of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, used Twitter with native Chinese students to train communicative and cultural competence. Students had to post a number of English tweets and react to the tweets of their fellow students. Twitter was viewed as a supplement to practice different aspects of the target language in authentic environment.
            The University of Vienna, Austria, used Twitter as an evaluation platform for student ratings. Every student had to send a tweet after each course unit with feedback to the teacher. Twitter's simplicity and electronic data handling required small administrative effort and turned out to be "a useful tool for evaluating a course formatively".
          At the University of Texas at Dallas, Twitter has been incorporated into the classroom setting of History courses with big groups of students. This allows more students to express their views in the class discussions and forces them to focus on the central point due to the character limit.
            According to telegraph.co.uk, Twitter is put on the new primary school curriculum. Children should be able to "organise and adjust" speaking and writing skills depending on the technology being used, including using "emails, messaging, wikis and twitters". During the primary years, children should also be taught to speak, write and broadcast using "blogs, podcasts, websites, email [and] video".
            In 2009, higher education faculty began using Twitter to help establish social presence and just-in-time interaction with students that are not bound by a learning management system.

Microblogging in Twitter

            Microblogging has the potential to become a new, informal communication medium, especially for collaborative work within organizations. Over the last few years communication patterns have shifted primarily from face-to-face to more online communication in email, IM, text messaging, and other tools. However, some argue that email is now a slow and inefficient way to communicate. For instance, time-consuming 'email chains' can develop, whereby two or more people are involved in lengthy communications for simple matters, such as arranging a meeting. The 'one-to-many'


What are the implications for teaching and learning?
            Much has been written about the benefits of active learning strate­gies—using tools and techniques that engage students in ways other than simply listening to an instructor and taking notes. In the same way that clickers facilitate active learning, Twitter, too, could be used in an academic setting to foster interaction about a given topic. Metacognition—the practice of thinking about and reflect­ing on your learning—has been shown to benefit comprehension and retention. As a tool for students or professional colleagues to compare thoughts about a topic, Twitter can be a viable platform for metacognition, forcing users to be brief and to the point—an important skill in thinking clearly and communicating effectively. In addition, Twitter can provide a simple way for attendees at a con­ference to share thoughts about particular sessions and activities with others at the event and those unable to attend.



ACTIVITY


For Higher Order Thinking Skills
 



Created by: RHEA NOVA P. TINDUGAN
TFR: 9:00-10:30
BSED ENGLISH


No comments:

Post a Comment