Blog about Twitter
There are many ways to hold a class discussion, whether it be in-person, over an online discussion board, or through social media like Twitter. Each has their benefits, but the three seem to compare in some ways.
When holding a discussion on a website like Blackboard, students tend to have more developed answers which results in longer inputs (in terms of word count). This allows for a discussion to go further in-depth than on a site like Twitter which limits thoughts to 280 characters, not words. While the character count has increased in the past years from 140, and there now is an easy function integrated to create threads, both which allow for a longer remark, this does not quite compare to the more developed and thought out responses we see on Blackboard.
These short comments and responses may seem more favorable and accurate in the students' eyes, though, and may also resemble the classroom more than a Blackboard thread does. When conducting an in-class discussion, professors tend to rely more on quantity and quality of input, rather than length. Certainly it is not ideal for one student to speak for a long time, and we cannot expect thought-out answers while a discussion is happening in real time. The tight bounds on tweets makes for a more accurate representation of a real-life discussions, and the comments to other people's ideas are easier to make as they can be quicker than a long response.
All three of these methods of discussion allow for great exchanges of thoughts. However, given the nature of students' smart, but shorter comments to the responses of others, it seems that Twitter is more comparable to an in-class discussion than Blackboard is.
When holding a discussion on a website like Blackboard, students tend to have more developed answers which results in longer inputs (in terms of word count). This allows for a discussion to go further in-depth than on a site like Twitter which limits thoughts to 280 characters, not words. While the character count has increased in the past years from 140, and there now is an easy function integrated to create threads, both which allow for a longer remark, this does not quite compare to the more developed and thought out responses we see on Blackboard.
These short comments and responses may seem more favorable and accurate in the students' eyes, though, and may also resemble the classroom more than a Blackboard thread does. When conducting an in-class discussion, professors tend to rely more on quantity and quality of input, rather than length. Certainly it is not ideal for one student to speak for a long time, and we cannot expect thought-out answers while a discussion is happening in real time. The tight bounds on tweets makes for a more accurate representation of a real-life discussions, and the comments to other people's ideas are easier to make as they can be quicker than a long response.
All three of these methods of discussion allow for great exchanges of thoughts. However, given the nature of students' smart, but shorter comments to the responses of others, it seems that Twitter is more comparable to an in-class discussion than Blackboard is.
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