To Tweet in classroms?

Using social media is becoming common way of communicating, especially between young people. Because people seem to spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and similar media, some have developed a strong negative attitude towards these new tools for communication. Those new media are problematic especially in education institutions, because it seems like students' attention is not where it should be because the just can't get off Facebook or can't stop Tweeteing, even during the class lectures. So the simple solution is to prohibit using this tools when in schools and universities. But is this really the best solution? It sure isn't a very creative one.

Some teachers and professors decided to take a different kind of approach. I've examined videos on You Tube, which present some examples of using Twitter for educational purposes and found some interesting cases:

First see a short video about using social networking in the classroom: Introduction

Cases of using Twitter in class:


Minneapolis Roosevelt High School

University of Texas

La Crosse Middle School





The main and very obvious argument why to use social media in class is that students use these tools to communicate with each other outside a classroom- so why not use it in class, too? Because students are interested in new ways of communication, why not incorporate this in education process?

Here are the advantages of using Twitter in classroom, which were presented in the above videos:

Using Twitter in class:

• Catching the attention of the students
• Increasing their participation
• Enabling more people to discuss the material at the same time
• Enabling students to return to the discussions and read them again
• Enabling the shy-ones to speak up
• It gets students more incorporated into the class
• Enables everyone to express their opinion
• Encourages participation
• Enables student collaboration

Using Twitter outside class:

• Enables to notify students about assignments
• Enables easy communication between teachers and students outside classroom
• Enables publishing of class announcements
• Enables students to connect and follow experts from different fields
• Enables teachers to publish suggestions for books and literature
• Enables teachers to publish reports about student's work for their parents
• Enables teachers to connect with other teachers in their subject area and learn from each other

Of course there are some limitations of the tool, especially because it enables very limited space for communication, and sometimes discussions require more in-depth arguments. But on the other hand the limited space encourages students to be brief and focused in their communication. There are also some concerns about mixing student's and teacher's private Twitter accounts with professional tasks, but this can easily be solved by creating two different Twitter accounts.

I believe that teachers and professors should consider the benefits of using Twitter in classes instead of disapproving and forbidding them in advance. And if they can think of a proper use, they should take the step and try it. I'm sure that the students will appreciate it very much.

Wiki-what?

When you turned on TV or turned a few pages of newspapers or clicked on online news few months ago, you couldn't miss stories about Wikileaks. Every day there was something new. Than there was substantial news coverage about Julian Assange and the Swedish lawsuits against him. And then? Nothing? Where did he go? What happened to Wikileaks?

Actually the nonprofit organization, called Wikileaks is still quite active on its website. The last news were posted on April 24th, relating to Guantanamo. Before that post, they didn't publish anything since February, but I wouldn't say that it indicates their devolution.

What is interesting is the fact that traditional news don't report about Wikileaks as much as they did when the organization first published some confidential files. I think that this case really shows us how traditional media still set agenda, despite the development and advantages of the new media. If television stations and newspapres wouldn't report about Wikileaks, most people wouldn't hear about it.

Although new media offer an opportunity for the suppresed voices to speak and publish information, which traditional media wouldn't dare to publish, they still need the "old" media to help them be heard.

See what Julian Assange has told about why the world needs Wikileaks here, or place yourself in Julian's shoes and try to steal secret files to Obama here.

Playstation network hacked! What do users say?

As you probably know already, Sony suffered a massive breach in its Playstation network (see short news clip) that led to theft of personal information, belonging to 77 million user accounts. It is one of the larges security break ins. This event shows how vulnerable we really are online, because our personal information are being exposed. When we register to different tools and websites online, we often have to provide our personal information and we put them in the hand of website owners. The safety of our personal information depends on some company’s security system. In the case of Playstation network, hackers broke into the system and accessed personal information of the users and maybe even credit card information (see how it happened here) And what happens now? Some lawsuits have already been filed against Sony and the courts will decide whether the company will have to pay the users for the damage, caused by the break in.

I was interested in the users’ response to this event, so I decided to look on Playstation forum. I followed some of the discussions about the event and I found out that people are mostly talking about next few issues:

• When will Playstation network start to work again? Some of the people who took part in the discussion are not worried about the event, they are just unhappy because they are unable to play online.

• Who is to blame for the event – Sony or the hackers? A debate evolved around a question about who should the users be angry at. Some are convinced that it is Sony’s fault; because they didn’t provide sufficient security, but others believe that in these days it is impossible to defend against very capable cyber-criminals and are very sympathetic to the company.

• To panic or not to panic? Some users have warned others that they have already received some suspicious e-mails and are wondering if it is connected to the breach. A few users responded to such posts with mocking and insults. They are convinced that those e-mails are just regularly spam messages and are sure that there is nothing to be afraid of.

• What to do? There are also some posts from people who are looking for advice what to do. Users have shared their experiences and told other what they have done. Some have immediately canceled their credit cards, while others believe that this is not necessary because even if the hackers did stole credit card information, they don’t have all the information needed for abusing them.

If you are interested in the debate, see Playstation forum.