For someone who vowed never to tweet too much, I found myself having fun discussing virtual worlds in our own virtual world (somewhat virtual).
While the Discussion Board on Blackboard can be helpful when talking among your classmates and professor, I found Twitter to be more useful. By adding tags, you can easily search topics that interest you, much more easily than with Blackboard. The notifications when someone replies to one of your tweets also helps you stay on top of the discussion as it progresses, and allows for more interaction as a result. However, it does not allow for such detailed discussion as on the Discussion Board, simply due to the character limit. Therefore, Twitter tends to be more helpful when sharing basic ideas/thoughts.
How does a Twitter discussion compare to a classroom discussion? Well, to be honest, I'm on the fence about that. On the one hand, being face-to-face for a discussion allows for much easier communication, especially if you're having a long, heated debate on a topic. Typing a 160 character response back and forth doesn't quite allow for such intellectual discourse. On the other hand, by allowing discussion to occur anywhere at any time, the discussion can continue on into different areas and ideas, as people are able to share them the minute it pops into their head - long after they leave the classroom or their computer (assuming you have a cell phone data plan).
I agree with your point about the limitation of 140 characters in Twitter. It's really hard to discuss some detailed topics via Twitter because of this reason. And like what you said, Twitter will be very useful if we want to speak out what kind of topic we will writer in our projects (like "I am going to talk about new media and privacy in my term paper".
ReplyDeleteI also have the same feeling on the convenience of face-to-face discussion. Because we want people response us timely always. Tweeting back and forth sometimes may be very annoying and still will not approach the goal of discussion.
I didn't think of it like that - I guess twitter is good for sharing basic ideas and concepts, but how do you draw the line between ideas and concepts and just pure stupidity? I feel like twitter easily becomes loads of information laking substance! Yes it is easier to follow and search, but what exactly is it that you are searching for?
ReplyDeleteAgain with the class room discussion- I think that a face to face conversation/discussion definitely fosters a better discussion. Seeing someone, hearing them, seeing their reactions, etc it all leads to creativity and discussion expansion!
A long conversation on twitter eventually becomes dragged out and outdated! However more people from different places on different time zones can contribute!
There are pros and cons to both - I guess it is personal preference and depends on what you are trying to accomplish!