As part of the project I run we’ve been toying with the idea of using twitter in some way as an additional stream of communication. Our first stumbling block was, if students are overloaded with communications from the university now, why add another one? what’s the benefit?
From my experiences here, the benefits are the brevity of messages.
The downside seems to be the disconnected nature of the messages. It’s a bit like chucking comments up in theair. If someone replies to one of my tweets, I have to search back and find out what I said. I twitter client that allows you to see threads would be great, but I can imagine would add a whole new dimension of complexity to twitter. And probably would be seen as unnecessary given so many people laud twitter for its simplicity.
So why would I wnat to convince the academics and students I work with to use it? We already know students can spot a badly used or badly implemented technology a mile off and will then take steps to exclude it from their learning lives. Whilst it’s good to have been given the opportunity to try twitter in an academic setting and I’m now much better placed to comment on it, I am so far not much of a fan.