As a teaching tool, PowerPoint can be awful. Is Twitter any better? One promotes passivity; the other, connectedness and interactivity (unless you follow people like us, who are about as responsive as a dining room table). The Chronicle of Higher Education raises an interesting question: should professors be tweeting with their students? Or is it a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction? Of course, some say brevity is the soul of wit, and 140 characters is very, very brief. [%comments]
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I firmly believe that there is a place for Twitter alongside face to face interaction. Students with professors that allow “backchanneling” during lectures often report higher levels of understanding and satisfaction with the task. Today’s generation needs a variety of input and output methods. They are multitaskers and professors must meet their learning needs.
Teaching is teaching–with or without all the new and old instruments/tools/paraphanalia. My daughter’s math teacher last year required that they merely memorize formulas –as if such tools would enable her to solve math problems by rote and never mind understanding the problem that they were meant to solve. She did not learn a thing. What the teacher did not teach her to do is to think for herself and on her own. By understanding the problem, she would not need the formulas in order to be able to solve it. And if she understood the formula, she would be in a position to use it and understand what it offers. Perhaps that’s the problem, the teacher did not understand what he was doing well enough to be able to convey his knowledge to students–hence the formulas.
I fear that until the Science of Mathematics is really understood, we may continue to produce students who don’t have a clue about it. The same applies to most subjects. I had an English teacher in hs, who gave us the greek myths to read, but did not explain or help us to understand what they offered in the way of understanding the human problems we all confront. I had to figure this out for myself and it took a long, long time (which most people don’t have). If you are fortunate to have a good teacher, that’s great. But how many of us are so fortunate.
Teachers are busy writing books, reading students’ thesese, writing articles for journals, going to meetings, preparing classes, collaborating with colleagues, writing research grants, doing research, teaching classes, reading journals, etc. It’s lucky you can find them at all outside of class. They are usually on tight deadlines. Unless you want a long discussion about something where you’d need to set up some kind of appointment, informal or formal, it would be best to handle the smaller matters by email. I don’t know if twitter would be as reliable, universal, or useful preserving a permanent record of the interaction.