Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.2.11 | Tweeting world history; the value of short-form writing; teenager, 1-governor, 0; and how Knight and Mozilla are reframing journalism for the digital age—all in this week’s Playback.

Tweeting History: The New York Times covers historical reenactments on Twitter this week with a story about @RealTimeWWII, which has grown to more than 15,000 followers since it started this past August. Alwyn Collinson, a recent Oxford University history graduate, has been live tweeting the events of World War II as they unfold in real time.

Collinson tells the Times the idea is to let followers experience how the war felt to ordinary people:

“I still get dozens of tweets every day from people who say, ‘I forgot I was following World War II, and I suddenly thought the Germans were about to invade Holland,’ ” Collinson said. “That’s exactly the effect I want: to convey the fear, the uncertainty, the shock. That’s what it was like for the people who lived through it.”

We’ve written previously about using Twitter to bring history to life for students (see tweeting the Civil War), and the Times has a few other great examples, including @1948War, which tweets the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Educators may want to check out twhistory.com,  whose tagline is, “Those who forget history are doomed to re-tweet it.” You can browse past re-enactments and get guidance on starting your own.

The Short Form: I wrote about Twitter’s burgeoning literary community when we covered the medium’s fifth anniversary earlier this year. The community is growing – from poets to social media theatrics. The National Writing Project has done a great job of highlighting uses of Twitter in the classroom specifically for teaching the art and craft of writing.

I like this new collection on its Digital Is site called The Short Form. Curated by Paul Oh, it demonstrates the value of learning to write 140 characters at a time.

In this resource post from Keri Franklin, director of the Ozarks Writing Project and assistant professor of English at Missouri State University, she equates learning to tweet with learning to write and to read. “I learned as much about audience, purpose, conventions, and handling writing apprehension as I have learned from writing much longer pieces,” she says.

From Twitter Quest to the Future of News: While we’re on the creative uses of the medium, Dan Sinker, formerly of @MayorEmanuel fame, has published a book, “The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel.” Get your copy today. If you’re not familiar with his satirical spin on Rahm Emanuel’s run for Chicago’s mayoral spot, it’s hilarious. Spotlight covered it, along with a look at faux media in the digital age.

Sinker has moved on from teaching journalism at Columbia College and is now heading up the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Project, working with developers and journalism to “reinvent the future of news.” The 2011/12 fellows were announced at the Mozilla Festival for Freedom and the Web in London. Sinker’s writing on journalism and the open web are worth following. He posts at the group blog Idea Lab.

Plus: Read more about the future of journalism and sites tracking digital news.

Teen Tweeters & Governors: If by some chance you missed all the hubbub this week about Emma Sullivan, the high school senior from Prairie Village, Kansas, who received a tumult of national attention after writing a disapproving tweet about Gov. Sam Brownback, here’s a good summary from the LA Times.

After attending a Youth in Government program at the state capitol, Sullivan tweeted: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” The governor’s staff noticed the tweet, complained, and eventually got Sullivan in trouble with her school principal. Debates over free speech ensued. The governor finally issued an apology to Sullivan on (where else?) Facebook, saying his staff had been overzealous in their social media monitoring.

There are a bunch of lessons here about politicians still being amateurs when it comes to new media communications, not to mention how to build up someone else’s Twitter followers (Sullivan apparently went from 60 to over 11,000 in a week). But perhaps most interesting are the latest stories about how Sullivan is struggling to deal with all this national attention, and the negative response from her peers.

R&R Offline: And finally, as we all gear up for the holidays, we should take a page from social media guru danah boyd who provides an important model in this ever more plugged-in digital age. Boyd takes regular “email sabbaticals” that she defines as “no internet, no work, no geeking out on research.” We all need to go offline to refresh, boyd says. See her tips on how to take your own email sabbatical here. If danah can do it, we all can.