Teaching Literacy In 140 Characters

Teaching Literacy in 140 characters

Having just returned from a wonderful time in Boston, learning from some of the best and brightest minds in the business, I come back with a major take-away; there is a new literacy out there that schools probably need to begin teaching, or at least stop ignoring: Twitter Literacy.  Certainly, I am not the first to figure this out, so here are my thoughts on it after NCTE/CEL.  Walk into any session at either of these two amazing conferences, and you would see brilliant presenters up front sharing precious  nuggets of wisdom with their audiences; however, if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought, by looking at the audience, no one was paying attention.  You might have thought they were getting an early leg up on their on-line Holiday shopping, adjusting their fantasy football lineups, or even trying to win the never-ending battle of keeping up with their work e-mail; however, they were engaged, sharing their thoughts on the presentation in real-time via Twitter. 

I had a few ah-ha moments with Twitter while there.  First, in full disclosure, I was a Twitter junkie prior to the conferences (@MrBronke if you would like to follow), so I may be coming at this with a bit of bias, but I will still share my thoughts.

1.   Every presentation at NCTE/CEL was “attended” by anywhere from many to thousands more people than were physically in the room thanks to teachers tweeting out key details, pictures of important slides/handouts, and overall great quotes.  This is POWERFUL.

2.   I was able to stop “taking notes” in the traditional way.  If there was something I found important that I didn’t want to forget, I simply tweeted it.  That did two things: allowed me to contribute to the professional dialogue on-line and now all I need to do is go back and look at my tweets from each session and I have my “notes” (this has huge possibilities for our students in our classes).

3.   The idea of multitasking, whether you agree with it or not, is here to say—yes HERE TO STAY.  I would argue the following for those of you who may not like this fact: yes, I am sure that every participant who was tweeting missed some important details from the session in which they were tweeting; however, what they added to the on-going, on-line professional dialogue has a far greater impact than what they missed (and quite frankly, what they missed someone else in that same session may have tweeted—so nothing may have been lost).

4.  Twitter Literacy is here to stay, so we must embrace it.  We must teach our students how to read and write in this 140 character language.  Having now been tweeting for a while, I can say this: it is very easy to tweet out simple observations in 140 characters, but to express a complex idea in that few characters is a skill—and it is one we need to start teaching to students!  Writing and reading in this Twitter world, when it is complex thoughts as opposed to simple statements, takes a great command of language and a critical reader’s mind that can fill in the gaps that are missing because of the brevity of the tweet.  That isn't easy.

As more and more schools go 1:1 we have a choice, get frustrated that our students will be multitasking with these devices, or we teach them HOW to multitask effectively with these devices.  Teaching the language of Twitter Literacy must be embraced.  Please understand that I am not, in ANYWAY, advocating that teaching Twitter Literacy skills replaces teaching traditional academic reading and writing; however, I am saying if we ignore it, we are ignoring the future (and quite frankly, the present).