Even More Teaching with Twitter

Over the past couple of years, I have been experimenting with ways to integrate Twitter more fully into how I teach particularly my online classes (more on that here, here, here, and here). To that end, I post updates to the syllabus, reminders of assignments, and other odds and ends to a Twitter feed dedicated to my intro-level Western Civilization class.  I’ve not been overwhelmed by the willingness of students to engage the medium, but it is very little energy for me to maintain the Twitter feed and I’ve found ways to embed it in Blackboard, so there is also almost no reason not to use it for the class.

Since I run two other Twitter feeds (one for our Office of Instructional Development and my own), I’m usually tempted to cross-post Tweets (using something like Hootsuite).  Often I stop short of cross-posting between my personal feed and my more professional feeds, however.  It’s not that I post inappropriate things to my personal feed – my life is pretty mundane even by academic standards (as this blog attests!); it’s that I was consistently worried that anything personal would run the risk of undermining my professional teaching persona in front of my online students.  Classroom students, of course, are another matter.  Here I am regularly banter with the class about music, sports, university affairs, or whatever else comes to mind in the five or ten minutes before class starts.  Once class starts, I am generally able switch back into professor mode and conduct re-engage a more typical classroom environment.

My colleague Cindy Prescott has a great blog post over at Teaching Thursdaythat points out some of the potential issues that could come from breaking down the professional barriers that separate faculty from students. While she is careful to contextualize her experiences, it is nevertheless interesting to consider how different her experiences with our students are from my own, how unpredictable teaching can be, and the difference in our teaching persona between online and classroom based courses.

That being said, this past week Kirsten Johnson published an article in Learning, Media, and Technology arguing that the disclosure of some “social” information on one’s Twitter account can bolster a faculty member’s credibility with students. Credibility is a blanket term for the characteristics that make it easier for a faculty member to relate to students and build the bonds of trust and respect that are central for learning. Johnson’s article at least suggests that personal disclosure can positively influence faculty credibility (in fact, the article suggest that a blend of scholarly and social posts to Twitter do little to influence credibility; the positive correlation only occurred in the group of students only viewing social Tweets). While I am not sure that Johnson’s study is sufficiently robust to allow us to generalize, I do feel it suggests that extending some longstanding classroom practices into the online world could produce positive results and that some of the worst-case scenarios associated with faculty use of social media are probably overstated (the most common examples are students friending a faculty member on Facebook and the mutual horror that comes from discovering that the other person has a life).  Moreover, Johnson’s experiment opens to door to considering some of the observations that Cindy makes in her piece on Teaching Thursday; in particular, it would be interesting to consider whether or to what extent gender influences expectations of faculty behavior online.