Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.25.11 | Twitter turns 5, and in its honor we check out how the new medium is inspiring playwrights, poets and educators.

Five years of Tweeting: In celebration of its fifth birthday, Twitter launched discover.twitter.com this week along with a new video, “Follow your interests. Discover your world.”

The video features prominent Twitter users, from astronaut Paolo Nespoli to Hillary Clinton. Besides learning that Snoop Dogg actually follows Martha Stewart’s tweets (who knew?), its interesting to hear people talk about how they use Twitter to listen and learn about the world.

From the moment co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet on March 21, 2006, the medium has grown at a crazy pace. Users around the globe now send 140 million tweets a day. Interestingly, the site has had a 182 percent increase in the number of mobile users over the past year. You can read the rest of the incredible numbers on Twitter’s blog.

We use Twitter (@spotlightdml) to keep up with what educators, students and technologists are thinking about learning and digital media. Are you following us? Who else do you follow on Twitter? Who should we be following? Comment or tweet us.

Twitter Bird Bards: In honor of Twitter’s anniversary and World Poetry Day, The New York Times asked four poets to each write a 140 character poem. My favorite was Elizabeth Alexander’s “Teeny tiny poem” about—what else?—tweeting. Read them all here. Readers have been tweeting their own poems using the hashtag #poetweet. It’s fun to browse their creations.

Twitterature Makes a Comeback: In a separate piece, the Times’ Randy Kennedy says that despite past jokes about uses of Twitter for anyone with serious literary leanings, there’s mounting “evidence that the literary flowering of Twitter may actually be taking place.”

As evidence, Kennedy points to the Twitter haiku movement, serial novels by John Wray, and the Chicago favorite @mayoremanuel that satirized Rahm Emanuel’s run for the city’s mayoral spot. (Check out Spotlights’ coverage of @mayoremanuel and other faux/real media.)

The linguist Ben Zimmer likens the constraints of the form to that of a sonnet. And Wray tells the Times that literary work on Twitter should be taken seriously: ” It’s just a different form. And it’s still early days, so people are still really trying to figure out how to communicate with it, beyond just reporting that their Cheerios are soggy.”

Plus, The Play’s the Thing: We’ve also been enjoying Reorbit’s experiment in social media theater that aims to “reengage audience interest in theater and literature through emerging new media technology and experiences.”

Launched by a group of writers and designers in San Francisco, the Twitter plays tell the stories of established characters in a more modern narrative. You can follow a ‘tween Samuel Becket, Sylvia Plath stuck in Northbrook, Ill., and The Big Friendly Giant from Roald Dahl’s “The BFG.”

Here are a couple of previous posts about tweeting historical events and great literary figures. (And while we’re as enamored as anyone with the medium, Christine’s blog post this week was a good reminder that educators and students have been using digital media to build upon texts and reimagine literature and history for a long time.)

Short Doesn’t Mean Shortcut: Those of us who write for a living know all to well that it’s much harder to be succinct than verbose. Writing in The New York Times, Andy Selsberg says educators should take a page from Twitter and spend more time helping students learn to write succinctly.

Selsberg, who teaches English at John Jay College in New York, describes his assignments which, he says, will not only make students stronger writers, but more prepared 21st-century citizens.

He asks his students to “come up with two lines of copy to sell something you’re wearing now on eBay”; or, to “describe the essence of the chalkboard in one or two sentences.”

When you have only a sentence or two, there’s nowhere to hide. I’m not suggesting that colleges eliminate long writing projects from English courses, but maybe we should save them for the second semester. Rewarding concision first will encourage students to be economical and innovative with language.

Citizenship today, Selsberg seems to be suggesting, means learning how to write comments for YouTube videos, Amazon reviews of great works of literature and yes, a networking email.

If we do so, he says: “Who knows, we might even start to leave behind text messages and comment threads that our civilization can be proud of.”