Learning in 140-Character Bites
In most respects, Prof. Natasha Neogi’s aerospace engineering class is like any other. It’s a large, hour-long lecture-style course at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. But at the halfway mark, Neogi’s class takes on a new twist. She invites her students to log on to Twitter — the “micro-blogging” service that limits messages to 140 characters — and write in with questions. Neogi sifts through the “tweets,” in Twitter-speak, addressing the most common sticking point at the end of class. Once widely dismissed as an instrument of vanity, Twitter is now showing up in serious places. Its citizen-journalistic role after last June’s Iranian election was much celebrated; in May, a NASA astronaut became the first to tweet from space. Bit by bit, Twitter is finding a role in education. [ASEE Connections, November 2009]