With Twitter now claiming over 500 million users and becoming as standard an inclusion on mobile phone deals (as common as text messaging used to be) — there’s a good chance people in the room and outside it will be able to use it as a ‘back-channel’ – for course notes, questions, live transcriptions and more.
A back channel is a stream of comments, responses and questions that takes place during and event such as a lecture, conference keynote or lesson. As more people become comfortable with the idea of having digital-peers, the growing trend is to use a ‘hashtag’ to signify for your event, from the general maunder of human posts. Users can then search for this on Twitter and find a stream of ‘tweets’ from people. For example, this weekends Meeting of the Minds saw a group of educators come together to discuss practice, using the hashtag #MOTM12. Twitter actually store about 3,2000 of each user’s Tweets before locking them away which causes potential problems for educators wishing to keep them as evidence or data for research.
A free tool called TweetDoc allowed the collection of #MOTM12 posts which could be downloaded as a document. This document has a number of uses including being a record of who participated (not just who attended), and as perhaps as a live transcription. It would not be too difficult to use this document with a screen reader.
As much of education is organised using course numbers, class names etc., using #mycoursegroup could be a simple and effective way to extend the conversation. In addition, tools such as TweetDoc can be used to curate this conversation, and upload into a course repository for students, and teacher analysis.
