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Interview
Micro Blogging with Twitter
A Q&A with David Parry, assistant professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas at Dallas
3/5/2008
The people who are most valuable for me to follow in Twitter are either the people who are relevant in the field--I follow Howard Rheingold, who wrote Smart Mobs, and Dave Weiner--plus following the people who I see maybe once a week.
Following my grad students, for example.... When I see them on Monday, I don't feel like I'm just seeing them on Monday. I have a sense of what they've been doing between class times. And that's when Twitter becomes really valuable, and when I think you start to see it's most significant value--when you're following people that you know, but who you don't see enough to build the close relationship you really need.
Briggs: Sometimes I think we overestimate how heavily students are using these new technologies. What has student reaction to your use of Twitter been?
Parry: As a caveat, I should say that I teach in a program called arts and technology, so the students I'm dealing with are not only tech-savyy, but they're really smart. Most of them have laptops that they bring to class. A lot know how to do coding and programming, and they also have an artistic side. So it's heavily skewed in my favor.
I would say that of all the things I did [during the fall when I introduced Twitter]--including blogs, Wikipedia ... a whole range of new technologies--it was by far the class favorite. It was most often mentioned on course evaluations, and it's also the one that stuck the most. Out of a class of 20, there are five who heavily use Twitter and five who occasionally use Twitter. So we're talking 50 percent who still use it.... So in that sense, it was well received by students.
Also, one of the things I was trying to teach in that class was [that] it's not about the nodes in the network; it's about the connections you can form between information. So a single blog post doesn't do you any good; it's the blog post connected to another blog post that creates the network.
Briggs: And Twitter really emphasizes that....
Parry: Right. I was having a hard time getting them to realize that.... I think they got it on a theoretical level, but they really weren't seeing the practical implication of it. Once we used Twitter, there were a couple of key moments in the first week. Someone had a question, and they would Twitter, whether it was related to class or not.... My own personal example was, recently I was buying a new computer monitor, and I Twittered, "What should I buy?" Four of my students responded: "Here's a bunch of research I did," and, "Here's my recommendation," all with links.
Briggs: What kinds of reactions did you get to your blog about ways to use Twitter academically? It seems to have garnered lots of attention.
Parry: It was mostly positive.... A lot of people built on my post in terms of, "Oh, here are some things you haven't thought of." People came up with some interesting uses, in particular about teaching large lecture classes, which I've never taught.
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