What does Twitter have to teach us? Brevity, at the very least. Keeping tweets under 140 characters forces us to choose our words carefully.
Some high school English teachers believe that incorporating Twitter into homework assignments will make students better writers. However, as this article in the Washington Post points out, asking students to tweet about Hemingway or The Canterbury Tales may make them more vulnerable to online predators, including their teachers. Virginia is calling for regulations regarding instructional use of social media, and some states have already banned Facebook and other digital tools beyond school control.
Will keeping Twitter out of schools protect young people? Twitter is a new technology, but relationships between students and teachers are hardly a new problem. Central to the plot of my novel, Blind Girl's Bluff, is an illicit liaison between an art teacher and a blind boarding school student in 1985, when computers were virtually absent from secondary school curricula. What makes my protagonist Lucy vulnerable is not the art that brings her to Monsieur Touchefeu's bed, but the trauma of having lost her father and the naivete of her perception that she is a grownup at age fifteen.
Blaming art or technology when bad things happen between teachers and students is far too simplistic. That's the kind of blame we could tweet in 140 characters or less, and that's why we still need novels and other traditional storytelling vehicles to capture the emotional complexities Twitter cannot. My hope is that teachers using Twitter to enhance their students' engagement act purely out of good intentions. In other words, I hope they are not slimeballs like Monsieur Touchefeu.
And for those of you who would like to meet my slimeball, here is a link to an excerpt from the first chapter of my novel (this comes immediately after the prologue, which appears on the "About Kelly" page of this site).
New technology often becomes the missguided subject of witch hunts. Is it possible that Twitter aids slime balls in hunting their prey? Yes, but statistically the cell phone must be the real tool used, as the Post article alludes. Most schools must already have codes of conduct that ban illicit behavior, no matter how it is initiated, electronic or ortherwise. It would be a shame if teachers couldn't email students, build websites with them, or use whatever the cutting edge in social media offers at the time. The biggest problems I have in retrospect, with regards to my own secondary education, was that it was not cutting edge and contemporary enough for me.
Posted by: Alex D | 03/28/2011 at 05:12 PM