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Twitter, e-learning anddigital cultures
Tony McNeill
Submitted for assessment for P01542: E-learning and Digital CulturesMSc in e-Learning (University of Edinburgh) • 3 January 2010mallix: My Twitter class of ’08http://www.flickr.com/photos/mallix/2586969604/
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic
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Preface
My assessmentpiece uses a single technology - this PDF - as the assemblypoint for textual and multimodal artefacts using a range of technologies andhosted on sites such asFlickr,WordPress,Slideshare,ScribdandPrezi. It seeks to capture, therefore, something of thecourse's pulmonary rhythm ofexhalation and inhalation, of scattering and convergence. In so doing I alsowant to question the boundaries and boundedness of academic discourse forassessment and to explore what constitutes the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of apiece of digital academic work.Already I foresee two different ways of reading this work that suggest thatwe’re at a transitional point in thinking about academic discourse. You may, forexample, be reading this as a printed text, perhaps seated on your sofa with acup of tea or glass of wine by your side. This is the ‘traditional’ view of theacademic text as print-based essay - what Womack (1993) calls the “defaultgenre”. Insofar as I’ve made it available in a print-friendly format, I’ve invitedyou to adopt this approach as one of preferred or encoded modes of reading.In this mode of reading, the boundaries of this academic work are defined bythe words on the A4 pages you hold in your hands; what’s ‘inside’ is what’scontained by the pages. However, the presence of underlined text in adifferent colour betrays the work’s digital origins and hints that the text maybe more than a self-contained entity.Alternatively, you may be reading this on screen, the computer perched onyour lap (and also with a cup of tea or glass of wine at your side). BecauseI’ve embedded links through the body of the text, I’ve invited you to read thework online as a digital artefact. Now the boundaries of the work are muchless clear; it spills out into a dozen or so sites each with their own links andinterconnections with other works I’ve produced. It’s more difficult to discernwhat’s ‘inside’ and what’s ‘outside’. If we are unable todefine where a workbegins and where it ends, canwe still prescribe wordcounts?Areexisting assessment practices appropriate to a‘new media age’ (Kress 2003) ofmultimodal texts? Will we have to change the mechanics of ‘how’ we assess toaddress the changes in ‘what’ we are assessing?
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Introduction
The focus of this piece is the trial use of Twitter on an undergraduate moduleon Shakespeare. It’s a study of the failure of a technology that many,especially in the blogosphere, have touted as offering great potential(Ahrenfelt 2009; Bradwell 2009; Gordon 2009; Hart 2009; Wheeler 2009)
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It’stherefore partly about a technology that has been constructed, in thediscourses or narratives around learning technologies, as offering both‘promise and threat’ (Hand 2008), although more the former than the latter.However, it is mainly a reflection on particular forms of socially situateddigital cultural practices and the implications such practices have to the kindsof technologies higher education practitioners use, or recommend to use, tosupport student learning and the development of learning communities. It’s areflection on the discrepancy between academic staff enthusiasm for atechnology and student resistance (e.g. thisemailandtweet) to it. Think of it as a digital culture clash. It’s therefore also about how we - as academics andresearchers - misconstrue students‘ willingness to engage with new digitaltools and environments. We construct an ‘otherised’ or ‘exoticised’ studentwhose ‘tech savviness’ make him/her always ready to explore new technologies(Herring 2008). The reality, however, as a number of research studies haveshown (Ipsos MORI 2007; JISC 2007; Jones &Lea 2008;Kennedy et al. 2009; Margaryan & Littlejohn 2008; Salaway et al. 2008; Traxler 2008) is morecomplex.Finally, it’s also about my first faltering steps into the world of digitalethnographic research. It includes data derived from semi-structured interviews(e.g.Roz,JennyandAmelia) and questionnaires as well as some analysis of undergraduate tweeting. The names of all participants have been either omittedor changed in order to preserve anonymity.
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suchprettyeyes

Thought this was a really useful insight into your experiment with your students. I know that Facebook is the super dominant social networking site but the way your students verbalise that is very interesting, especially since that comparison between facebook and Twitter reveals a lot about their choices and influences. Do you think if they'd been asked at the beginning of the year which social ne

reply01 / 05 / 2010
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