A neat thing happened during my twittering about the plumbing joys last weekend. At some point, I think somewhere in day two, I stopped thinking of the tweets as individual items, and started thinking of them as a narrative. That struck me as important because it think it makes a good analogy to what we want students to do with a liberal arts education (or any education, for that matter). We're looking for a magic to happen when distinct and isolated observations or datapoints (the individual tweets) to suddenly form a coherent picture or narrative. This is what I emphasized when I taught first-year composition. Start with making observations / gathering evidence / analyzing, and look for a way to synthesize it. Tweets turning into a narrative is just another form of the same process.

A really beautiful thing that I saw happening was that, at particular moments, other people's tweets in response (and thanks everyone for the solidarity/sympathy!) showed an intersection with their narratives. Michael's (mwillits) and Cathy's (saracup) tweets were especially nice examples of that. That's another good analogy to education -- the way we synthesize the world can and should have interesting intersections with how others synthesize the world.

And so this might turn into a neat exercise for students. Imagine asking students to twitter about what they are studying or working on for a semester. Then, spring the real assignment on them: have them look back at their tweets for the semester and select ones out to produce a narrative of their intellectual development. First, just in the edited list of tweets, including where there were interesting intersections, then in a more reflective written form. Might be fun.