Microblogging in Education

140 characters doesn't seem like quite enough to learn anything! 140 characters, really? But education is finding itself greatly added by this recent discovered technology we like to call microblogging. It has only been four years since the first tweet was posted around the world. Education has already found microblogging to be a useful tool in more than one realm of teaching and learning. With the new emphasis on communities of practice, collaborative learning, and authentic use of technology, teachers in high schools and colleges are beginning to use sites like edmodo, twitter, plurk, identi.ca, and friendfeed to foster a sense of community in well, cyberspace. Teacher's can use microblogs educationally to create personal learning networks, to assess opinion, for project management, conferences, research, and for sharing new ideas. Edmodo, a strictly teacher or student microblogging site, has over 17 applications that the network considers to be useful to both teacher and student. Does microblogging about education really create a community, foster new ideas, and support the learning process? Who knows.... but we are going to find out pretty soon considering that the realm of teaching is becoming influenced by technology at a rapid pace.


I talked to my friend who is a teacher and she said that as classrooms move towards the idea of situated learning, community has to be constantly redefined and reexamined. Given how important microblogging is in creating networks of friends, it should be functional in uniting networks of learners.