Learning to Teach

Although the twitter assignment ended yesterday, I decided to continue using it, at least for the next week.  What I’ve found so far is that I have trouble keeping up with posts.  By that I mean that I feel like I need to read or at least skim every tweet that comes my way.  I think if I don’t, I might be missing something important or interesting.  Because twitter doesn’t organize tweets in any sort of threaded manner, I also find that it can sometimes be difficult to understand what someone is talking about without having to do an inconvenient amount of clicking and searching.  I think I need to work out a new way to approach the software, because right now it seems like a nuisance compared to other options.

What I do like about twitter is that it seems like it could be a good way of easily sharing web-based content with other people.  The favorite option makes it easy to mark a tweet to revisit later.

I also agree with Carrie’s comment that twitter might be a better way to get to know one’s fellow students than the traditional ’round-the-room approach.  Because the content is unstructured, people can choose to share or not as they see fit, and respond more or less quickly to one another.  Conversation can take place, rather than the unidirectional I-tell-you-something-about-me-and-you-forget-about-it when-the-next-guy-stands-up approach.

I am now halfway through the twitter assignment, wherein I was asked to twitter for 48 hours.  During that time I am to post (tweet?) at least six times and reply to other twitterers (is that a word?) at least twice.

Overall my feeling about this technology is ambivalence.  I am a regular Facebook user, and like the ability to embed things like Youtube videos and uploaded images.  I also tend to use Facebook chat more and more often.  These things enable me to communicate more clearly things like mood, and especially with something like chat, to detect and clarify miscommunication relatively quickly.  I don’t see Twitter as having these capabilities.

One thing about Twitter I am still curious about is the 140 character limit.  I tend to be fairly wordy, in part because I like to be clear about what I really mean.  In the past, this has meant adding lots of caveats and clarifiers.  Because this isn’t really am option with Twitter, I have the feeling that to use it most effectively, I would need to learn how to think a little differently.  As a philosopher, this strikes me initially as a bad thing: it can be really difficult to convey an interesting idea in 140 characters, especially if it’s something that most people would be unfamiliar with.  But maybe this is just bias on may part.  What draws me to both philosophy and mathematics is the expression and manipulation of concepts.  Math is very succinct.  Could Twitter be the mathematician’s Facebook?