How I Am Using Twitter to Design and Develop a Course

Barry Bachenheimer, a student here in our online EdD program in Educational Technology, asked me to share my thoughts on the question, How has technology and/or media affected a change in the way you learned in the last year? for a conference he is working on.

Interestingly enough, I am working on developing course called Instructional Computing 2 for our department. And there are so many ways to think about designing a course, so I decided to try something different.

Since June 2008 I began tagging my favorite Tweets from my Twitter network. Twitter has a tool that will allow you to do this, i.e., marking a tweet as a favorite. For me Twitter is a learning network, a place where I can follow the shared thoughts of hundreds of local, national, and international teachers, scholars, movers, and shakers.

I started sifting through the two hundred or so favorited tweets. Some tweets were to weblinks, some were simply thoughtful reflections. As I sorted through them I noticed specific patterns emerging related to topics I wanted to cover in my class, like social and participatory media, identity, change, innovation, life on the screen, trust, safety, opportunity gaps, relationships, sharing, communication, collaboration, social action, civic engagement, and the future.

This process of using Twitter and my learning network (i.e., social media) has allowed me to develop a comprehensive course that embodies the collective intelligence of hundreds of brilliant people. In this sense, social media has clearly impacted the way I think about course content and course design. I can learn from experts, share in their thinking and discoveries, and engage them with follow up questions and comments. This is a large shift in the way I develop course content. I used to begin designing a course based on what I know. Now I start with what others know and and work my way from the edges to the center.

Pretty neat, huh?

image: http://ny-image1.etsy.com/il_430xN.29721697.jpg

[video link: How I am using Twitter to design and develop a course]