Tweet Tweet - Who Cares?

Social media has been around for years now. After Myspace popularized self marketing on the web it was only a matter of time before thousands of other websites took up the call; the question is, who cares? I think one of the most common problems with the Internet is that people see only the negatives. Twitter is generally viewed as an unsupervised platform upon which the youth can waste away with their time following celebrities and Tweeting about what they had for lunch. I still remember learning about twitter jail, the term describing when twitter blocks a user due to overactive posting (over 1000 tweets in one day,) and thinking "Man, these kids need a hobby."

Then it hit me, the kids have a hobby: Tweeting. Twitter has become a common place on the Internet for young people to interact. Kids feel comfortable in the, oh so familiar, Twittersphere. Let me just put it out there, it's the perfect time to exploit Twitter, it offers a lot of advantages over traditional means of communication with students.

Andrew Mercer, a music teacher who teaches music over the Internet to students in isolated communities, agrees. He's well associated with the inter net's resources as his livelihood depends on it. He claims that one of the best advantages of twitter is its small word limit. "Twitter is a blogging tool, but with a twist -Twitter is a micro-blog. Unlike traditional blogs, which permit authors to write lengthy entries on the topic of their choice. Twitter limits each posting to 140 characters. No pictures of your cat, no videos of you and your friends doing The Chicken Dance - just 140 characters per posting, or 'tweet' as it is called. This cap has had an interesting (and refreshing) effect on what people post to the Internet - authors are forced to 'make it brief.'"

Twitter also helps to get students involved in the conversation. It's much less intimidating to post a couple of words than it is to think "Hey, I have to write two pages to make a blogger post worth it." Mercer finds that his students are more often asking for help, and helping each other, because Twitter's feed is never flooded with pages and pages of blocked paragraphs. The students are on it anyway, why not go to where they already are?

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