Following Faculty Academy, many people around UMW have caught the Twitter-bug. A few people wondered about how it could be used as a communication channel in the classroom, sort of as a guided back-channel communication.

I've cobbled together a rough draft of what something like that might look like. The idea is to have one space that collects the tweets (twitter messages) meant for the class, and another space that just provides a space to write the tweets and to list all of the tweets a user would normally get. It requires using a specific account for each class this would be used in, which might be logistically tricky, unless one creates a new user for each class. This first draft takes that approach. The pseudo-user and the members of the discussion need to 'friend' each other through the Twitter.com interface.

The class-specific area filters out the messages that are not intended for just that class (messages in Twitter can be directed to a specific user with "@user" in the message). A user thus gets, in essence, two different views of the tweets. One is the usual view one gets from the Twitter.com interface or TwitBin--a running list of all the messages from the user or their friends. The other view collects together the tweets for that event.

In theory, there could be some neat cross-pollination of ideas due to the overlap between conversations. Say that this is being used for some event you are attending, and you direct tweets responding to things at the event. Your Twitter-friends who are not at the event would also see the messages you direct to the event space. (the same thing is true of all twittering, for that matter, because of overlapping and distinction between users' friends lists). Others would then see parts of the interesting conversations taking place. In a very optimistic view of students in higher ed., students might discover idea under discussion in a class via the overlap. Better still, if there are TWO classes using this at the same time, I imagine this: A tweet to a class about, say, medieval politics that references a discussion taking place at the same time in a medieval art class, suddenly discovering a connection because, through the tweets, the student has access to a sliver of the other class. Or better yet, the student raises his or her hand, or talks to one or both professors after class.

Pie-in-the-sky maybe, but it's a fun fantasy, and worth tweaking along on this project for a while.

I'm leaving this wide-open for now if people want to peek in at it here. Just remember it's still buggy, especially in the layout for different monitors. And, I've made no effort to make it IE-compliant...you'll probably want Firefox to look at it.