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Teaching with Twitter means students are more involved. And that can take classes in risky directions, writes Jeffrey R. Young in College 2.0.
Maybe Sugato Chakravarty should wear a helmet to class. The professor of consumer sciences and retailing at Purdue University repeatedly attempts the instructional equivalent of jumping a motorcycle over a row of flaming barrels.
OK, asking 250 students to post questions on Twitter during a class doesn't risk life or limb. But it can cause ego damage if the mob of students in his course on personal finance gets disorderly online.
He has given them the power to do just that. As Mr. Chakravarty paces the front of a stadium-style lecture hall, wearing a wireless microphone to make sure his lecture reaches the nosebleed seats, some students crack jokes anonymously in an official Web forum. The course is one of two at Purdue that are testing homemade software called Hotseat, which lets students key in questions from their cellphones or laptops, using Twitter or Facebook.
A constant stream of comments, often tangential, accompanies his talks. An incident of cheating came up early in the semester--a student asked classmates for a quiz answer. During one session this month, students took over the back channel to ask the professor to cancel class Thanksgiving week so they could have a longer vacation. "So with 41 votes are we not having class that monday of Thanksgiving?" asked one hopeful student after others had endorsed the sentiment. (The class is still on.)
The moment is telling. Opening up a Twitter-powered channel in class--which several professors at other universities are experimenting with as well--alters classroom power dynamics and signals to students that they're in control. Fans of the approach applaud technology that promises to change professors' role from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side." Those phrases are familiar to education reformers, who have long argued that colleges must make education more interactive to hold the interest of today's students.
The unanswered question, though, is whether that theory can work in practice, in a room packed primar ily with 18- to 22-year-olds who can seem more interested in...