Twitter U

Is Twitter the future of education?

If you’re Cole W. Camplese, director of education-technology services at Penn State, University Park, you might be in the “yes” column.

The prof apparently prefers to “teach in classrooms with two screens—one to project his slides, and another to project a Twitter stream of notes from students,” said Jeffrey Young in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece.

Responding to the claim that this might be distracting, he noted that the “additional layer of communication will make for richer class discussion.”
Apparently his hope is that rather than descending into complete chaos, “the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls.

“I’m not a fulltime faculty member,” said Camplese, adding that he uses his classrooms as a lab to decide what to promote as future teaching methods on campus.

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.

Deborah Lambert