how to aggregate student comments in lectures using Twitter - but, I still think as a lecturer I'd use an sms service.
This post is driven from a comment by Alice on a previous post. The question was can students use their twitter accounts (assuming they have one) to post comments and questions to the lecturer to either addresses directly in the class, review later, or if they are more creative encourage other students to answer. The answer is yes, and the mechanics are as follows;
- Agree on a tag to be used by people when hey are tweeting about the unit. The unit code would make sense. Then they simply use this tag at the start of the tweet.
- People (the lecturer and other students) can use a real time search engine for Twitter posts, such as Tweet Scan (http://tweetscan.com/index.php).
- I also like the idea of using a word cloud to give a visual depiction of what people are twittering about. A word cloud represents the frequency of words in a piece of text and represents this frequency through the size of the font. So the more frequently the word appears the large is its size. Tweet Scan will allow you access the results of the real time search as an RSS. So the creation of a word cloud is very straight forward. Simply insert the RSS feed address into a tool such as MakeCloud (www.makecloud.com) or the url link from Tweet Scan into Tag Crowd (www.tagcrowd.com).
So it can be done :-)
However, as a lecturer, what would be the best model? Well I suppose of the key question is, why am I doing it? Thinking back to my lecturing days, then I’d use this feedback from students immediately, i.e., during the lecture. Plus I’d want an easily accessible archive so I can reflect in a slightly longer term, and also use this to feed into the course design next time I run it. I’d also have concerns about accessibility to Twitter, in particular have al students got a Twitter account. So, given these requirements then I’d feel that using something like the EduTxt service would be preferable. It is simple, and all students have phones. However, from the students’ perspective then it would be more beneficial to focus on the Twitter route. This is because it is more open, and the control sits with them. Oh why is it never black and white?