Matthew Mitchell: Hello, this is Matthew Mitchell and today I'm with David Silver. Well, people will learn what we're talking about with social media and Twitter in just a moment, but I know everybody should know who you are. Maybe there's some people who don't. Could you just tell us a bit about, really for our purposes, not about your research so much, but what department you're in and what courses do you teach, typically?
David Silver: Thanks. My name is David Silver. I'm Associate Professor of Media studies and Environmental Studies and the coordinator of the Urban Ag minor. My two interests and strangely, they overlap are social media and food. On one side in media studies, I teach our intro to media studies class. I'm very interested in the history of media. I say from printing press to WordPress, but then I also teach production classes in social media. We've been doing that for about two decades now. I teach Digital Media Production where we do anything from blogging to maps to Wikipedia to Twitter, et cetera.
On the other side, I teach classes like community garden outreach where I teach students how to harvest food, cook food and serve food to others. What I'm really interested in is trying to find spaces, pedagogical spaces right between that. How do we use social media to enhance food justice? How do we use production of food to get us away from social media sometimes? It's that interplay between those two spectrums that I'm really interested in, both as a teacher and as a researcher.
Matthew: Fantastic, thank you so much. David, I know you've been using social media. Sometimes I've heard you refer to as that Twitter not. Now, what I want to do is I know you've been exploring using social media and Twitter for a little while now. You didn't start last year. My curiosity is what got you interested? The first time you used something like Twitter in a course, why? Then how did it go? Because a lot of times when I do things for the first time, I think it's a great idea. That's why I put in a course, but didn't go so well the first time and I have to adjust.
David: Good question. Well, if I can just back up a little bit. I've been teaching, what we call now social media for actually two decades. It's weird. I started in '94 as a graduate student, and I started teaching this thing called mosaic which turned into Netscape. I taught students at the University of Maryland how to make home pages on the World Wide Web. The reason I mentioned this is because it was very pivotal for me and for the professor I was working with. This was as an American Studies PhD student.
What was pivotal is to have students make their work public, and this was through home pages. Any teacher who's seen that happen, he or she knows that it's super exciting. We all understand the gig. Usually a professor will assign something, students do it and it goes back to the teacher. The teacher grades it and it goes back to student, fine. With pages on the web, it was very exciting because students had to be public.
They had to present their work that would be both acceptable to the professor but cool to their friends who may look at it. Also, I just saw the quality going up. I was very interested in that. As you can imagine, as the World Wide Web developed, I started getting into blogging, and I think that's when I arrived at the University of San Francisco in, gosh, 2006. I was really interested in blogging and I actually had an aversion towards Twitter. I was one of those professors who said, ÒMy ideas are too complicated for 140 characters.Ó
I had my students do blogs and I had my students do all this stuff that I had been doing. Until one day, I started noticing that one of my students was tweeting about the class, and she was tweeting great things about the class, about what they were doing. I got really fascinated in it that the student was taking a medium-- it wasn't required for her to do this, and she was sharing her thoughts. I approached her and asked her a little bit about stuff.
Then I approached the class and said, "Are you guys interested in Twitter?" As you can imagine, 50% said, ÒYes,Ó and 50% said, ÒNo.Ó [laughs] I didn't start at that class, but I decided, and this was for myself too. When you're teaching technology, it's always difficult to keep up. You want to keep up but you have to screen out some of the technologies because there's too much and there's too much hype on all of them. Twitter though, after three, four years, it seemed like it was really going, and it was becoming a big deal.
I thought, to be responsible, I had to learn it myself and I should incorporate into a classroom. It was 2007, I used it and I loved it immediately. I loved it immediately. I noticed that what it had done was replace a number of things. The first thing is it replaced the listserv. I love the listserv but our students hate it. I love that damn listserv. Students never liked it. They barely like email, so that didn't work. Then second, what I noticed is it replaced me sending out emails of-- I had a different idea about our reading or, ÒSurprise field trip, everyone meet here.Ó
It replaced the alerts, the email alerts, but then third, what it replaced was in the past, I'd had a lot of papers and students would come in and turn in their papers into a box. What I loved is that when I had students do a flicker set or a blog post, they were able to announce their work via Twitter. That was the big deal for me where suddenly it would be the equivalent of students walking into your classroom saying, ÒHey, everybody? I wrote this wonderful paper on the Maltese Falcon.Ó
It's very interesting to have that happen where their work is being public. I really enjoyed it. Then the last thing that after a year of exploration, the big thing to me was that Twitter was still a hot technology, and so to have students try to navigate the information literacy of, again, fulfilling the requirement of their assignment for their professor, and also having a quality for their peers, but having a coolness or engagement factor for their friends.
That, to me, has been and continues to be probably the number one exciting thing that the platform through which they communicate with their friends can also be the platform through which they communicate their research.
Matthew: Now, I'm going to go back a little bit. This is great context. What you talked about is your first experience with Twitter in a class, the young woman who was tweeting about the class. Now I know how you got into it and what attracted you to it. How did you formally incorporate Twitter for the first time in a class? What was required and what happened? What was that initial experience? Because you could have gone a lot of different ways that people need to follow you on Twitter. It could have been that people have to tweet something about the class 50 times a week. Or there could have been different ways that you handled that. What was that initial foray like?
David: Yes, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that for a long time and I think I made a lot of mistakes. The first assignment is the assignment that I use all the time. I love getting them to start up a Twitter account, follow everyone and tweet a little bit within 15 minutes. That's what I really like doing. It's not HTML that takes a lot of time. It's not writing, which takes a lot of time. It's not coding. The beauty of Twitter is it's so easy.
Similarly, the elements of Twitter are elements that the students already know because it's a Facebook generation, they know how to make a profile. They know how to do that. They know how to comment on other people. They know how to make engaging material, and they also know how to upload photographs. It's all there. What I would have them do is start a profile. Back in the day, I always made it mandatory that they had to use their name. I didn't want USFBunny36. I didn't want that.
The reason behind that is I really wanted them to take ownership of their words. I didn't want this anonymity that often leads to flame wars which is disrespectful stuff. Let me just say, I know that it wasn't just a fear of disrespectful stuff. I wanted them to take ownership to make their content good with their name behind it. Then I had them follow everyone. What I liked about that is invariably, someone will say, ÒWell, how do we find out everyone?Ó
I wouldn't give them the answer. I'd say, ÒFind it yourself.Ó They would discover that, well, Mariah sitting next to me, I can figure out where she's at. If I notice who she's following, I can start looking at stuff. This starts the process of how I teach all technologies. I give them very little information upfront and I say, ÒExplore, try to break it, try to tweak it, keep on exploring.Ó Then what I also used to do is ask the students to follow all the people that weÕre reading in that class. One week we'd be reading this. That changed because I started to realize that some of the people who we would read were really boring tweeters, and I felt really bad having these students follow them. Also, there's some people who tweet about 100 messages a day.
I felt really sad for my students and really embarrassed for myself asking them to follow this person. Then I changed that to say, ÒFollow them for a week, and by all means, stop following them if you would like to.Ó That's how I started it. Then what I would do is, the next stage was, anytime we did something, anytime we did something in class, anytime we try to reinforce something into the community or over the weekend that you learned in class, I would say-- Maybe we're reading about social spaces in the city.
I teach a class called Golden Gate Park, maybe we're teaching social spaces in the city. How can you design social spaces to create different interactions? I would have them read maybe some Jane Jacobs and then go out into the park or go down to Haight Street and do some analysis. Instead of just having them write about it, I usually have them use photography, like do a Flickr set about spaces that work. We share a common interest in cities that work.
Then one day I'd say, ÒAnd tweet it up.Ó The moment I said it, I realized, ÒWhat a goofy Professor term to say to a bunch of 20-year olds,Ó and they thought it was so goofy that they started saying things like David or Professor Silver, whatever they're calling me that semester, ÒDo we tweet this up?Ó You had to share everything you do. If I was teaching a food class and had them go to a food truck or go into a community they've never gone to and experience some of the food, not only would they do the assignment, or reflective essay, or photography or video, they had to tweet it up.
That is the part where their content was, it started to flow. The Twitter stream of our class started to flow, not only with students saying, ÒI'm in the mission,Ó or, ÒLast night was crazy,Ó but more like, ÒHere is my photo set of 16 photographs about street food in the mission.Ó Well, I found that fascinating. Again, I keep going back to this. Anytime I can get my students to share their research beyond the classroom is a win for all of us. What I loved about it is IÕd start seeing these posts being favorited by their fellow peers or communicate-
Matthew: Outside the class?
David: No, I'm sorry, inside the class first, but also their friends are like, ÒYou got a great classÓ, or, ÒWhen am I going to move to San Francisco?Ó What I really liked was when student X in my class posted something and student Y said, ÒThat's fantastic. Where did you see it? Where was that mirror? Where was that taco stand?Ó Then they would also say, ÒI really like that. You should check out what I did with North bead.Ó Now suddenly, students are sharing their work and feeling proud of their work without missing anything, without requiring them to do it. That was the very exciting part.
Matthew: This is going to be a little bit of a tangent. Hopefully, I can go back and follow some of my notes here, but you said something that was-- you may only do in this way, but was potentially a really interesting thing, because it seems that the way that you're using Twitter is there are cases where they're not just tweeting. The tweet is a portal to more in-depth information. Where I'm specifically thinking of it in your case is theyÕre tweeting a Flickr set.
They could see one photo on Twitter, but now they're clicking a link and they're going to the Flickr set. Depending on how they've set that up, it could just be 16 photos or it could be 16 photos with brief or more in-depth explanations depending on how they set up. That's really interesting. I'm wondering, are there other ways that you use Twitter as, I don't know how to describe it, as a portal for more in-depth information beyond Flickr?
David: Yes. I'm glad that you touched upon that because that's what I think is effective with what I'm doing. When it works, that's what's happening. Now, let me say quickly the examples I've given are mostly media studies classes. I'm teaching Flickr, I'm teaching Instagram, I'm teaching these things. I also want to say that it gets difficult. It was easier to do five years ago when assigning studentsÕ blogs was more common. Let me back up. I'm sorry. It's no problem for me to do this with photography. We're all photographers now. We really are.
Matthew: Everybody [unintelligible 00:15:29].
David: Exactly, what they want or not. We're all photographers now. That's easy, and because of Instagram, we all are archiving publicly our photographs. There's a there, there to go to. Great. With words, it's a little bit different. Not every student has a blog. Actually, most of our students do not have blogs, and I do not want to send them to a site on Blackboard or Concord because I don't believe in those sites. I don't want my students to be doing stuff in private hold silos.
What happens, if a student writes an essay, she or he will probably not tweet it out because, where's it going to go to? Maybe Google Drive possibly. For that reason, I'm thinking about that. What is the legitimate platform for words? Maybe it's Medium. It's something beyond blogs. I think when you see-
Matthew: I think you need to tell people what Medium is.
David: Sorry. Thank you.
Matthew: [crosstalk] think of that term Medium.
David: Absolutely. Perhaps the answer is a relatively new platform called Medium, which is really just a new blogging platform. It's developed by this guy, EV Williams, who helped developed Twitter. By saying Medium, it's trying to rebrand blogs. If I tell my students, ÒWe're going to start a blog,Ó there's going to be a whole chorus of yawns. it just feels like the Ô90s. It does, or maybe early 2000s. I'm sorry for that because the concept of a blog, a public platform for writing and ideas is wonderful. It feels like it dates it.
So far what I've had students do is, it's easy to get them to tweet to their blogs or to the photography. Lately what I've been doing, you asked if I do this in other ways. I will do something which I call it class-sourced reading. I'll say something like, ÒOkay, next week, we're going to be learning-- let's say, it's Golden Gate Park class, Òwe're going to be learning about the Midwinter Fair of 1894.Ó This is a first-year seminar and one of the key things students need to learn is how to find readings.
I can present them with a couple of readings, but I'd much rather have them say, ÒI want you to spend about two or three hours finding three or four readings about the Midwinter Fair. Skim them or read them, and then tweet about them, and let all of us see your tweets.Ó Someone finds a great reading that's in a book, wonderful. Someone sees an online essay. Someone sees a photographic archive from San Francisco Public Library.
I like that. In some ways, they're trying to build consensus. It also privileges or it also helps people to get their work done early. The first person who posts that photographic archive gets a little bit more cachet as opposed to second person who says, ÒI also found that,Ó or, ÒThat archive is amazing. We should all spend time with it before class.Ó That's another thing.
Another quick example is, what I've done often in-- I teach food classes both production of food and food writing or food media. I have a class called Green Media, which is telling stories about growing food. In this case, what I'll have them do is maybe I'll give them a single vegetable. I'll say, ÒIn San Francisco, kale, or eggplant, or soba noodles.Ó I'll say, ÒCome up with some recipe that all of us will find absolutely enticing.Ó
Matthew: Now, wait so, everybody gets the same thing or-
David: Correct.
Matthew: -everybody gets it different?
David: No, everyone has the same ingredient.
Matthew: ItÕs variations [unintelligible 00:19:41]?
David: Absolutely. Absolutely, and I don't even say I want an appetizer, a main course. I just say it has to use kale. It has to use eggplant. It has to use soba noodles. What they will do is they'll start finding different stuff. What's wonderful is that there's so much style in what they find. There is so much about themselves in what they find. Some of the Gormans go to Epicurious and they find these very intricate meals. One of my favorite students, he was this hardcore skateboarder and he found 10 recipes skateboarders love, and it had these recipes that showed a little bit of him.
In some ways they seem just a simple homework assignment and they all are simple, but they're building community, and equally important, they're building voice among the students. That when we see a link, we're not only learning that you want to make kale chips, great, but you quick meals because you don't to cook or et cetera. It brings a voice across.
Matthew: Now, this may be related, but somebody, because I knew I wanted to interview you for a while and somebody said to me, ÒYes, he does all this stuff with thick tweet.Ó I have a feeling it's all connected, but I'm not sure. What the heck do you mean by a thick tweet? What goes into it and what doesn't go into it?
David: Right, right. Thank you. This is something I came up with, I think in 2006, the first time I used it and I'm sticking to it. There's not many fear rising of Twitter. It's a very easy concept. A thin tweet is something, is a tweet that contains one idea. A thick tweet is something that contains two or more ideas, often containing a link. Okay? The reason I say that, when you really think about it, almost everything is a thick tweet. The reason I brought this up is I did not want my students to start tweeting, ÒOh, it's raining.Ó Or, ÒCan't wait to see the Giants game tonight.Ó That kind of silly stuff that gives Twitter a bad name, or, ÒI had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch.Ó
I don't like that stuff and I actually don't think it has any place in our classroom. At the same time, how dare I tell the students how to use a platform, especially a platform that they may have already been using before my class? I can tell them how I want my papers, how I want their reflective essay, how I want their bibliographies, but it's a fine line when I start telling them how to use social media. Okay? Now, so when I started using thick tweets, I just started saying try to compact a lot of information in there. You only have 140 characters, but actually start thinking about it as, ÒWow. I have 140 characters.Ó Start using link shorteners link Bitly, start using photographs, start doing something.
I saw so many wonderful tweets about Outside Lands. We're doing this interview right after the weekend of Outside Lands. I saw this one tweet that I thought was just-- it said something like, ÒNow my San Francisco life is complete,Ó and it was a picture. It's a very strange picture. It was a picture of this young woman who took a selfie next to the giant screen of Elton John who played the last night of Outside Lands. I don't know if it was ironic or genuine. I still don't know really Elton John and 20 somethings. I don't understand that. What I loved about it was when I saw that tweet, ÒMy San Francisco life is now complete,Ó I had to click on the photograph. I had to see it. That's what I want my students to do.
I want students to think about 140 characters as a very large terrain to get an idea out. I want them to think about this. Not because I believe in sound bites. I don't want presidential debates to be run with 140 characters, but I know that my students are entering into a world where they have to get their idea out creatively and very quickly. I think this is really good practice for them to do it. It's a long explanation. What I like about it is I think some people said, ÒWell, I'm not sure if I call it thin or thick tweets, some people said is it an anthropological term?Ó I just liked it as a thing to think with. It's a way to think through these things. The students knew that I preferred thick tweets that tell me a lot of information. I don't need to know that you ate cottage cheese last night. It just doesn't interest me.
Matthew: It sounds like the way that you approach this and it caught on with your students was you presented it as a suggestion, not as a requirement.
David: Correct.
Matthew: Clearly, it must have been successful enough. You probably once in a while get the cottage cheese for lunch tweet, but it's been successful enough that there was something in the way that you presented it that resonated with them.
David: I think you're right. I think you're right. I think that there is a collective pressure. I never said you cannot use thin tweets. I did suggest that I said, please be respectful that I'm requiring you to follow all of your peers. You don't have to read all of your peersÕ tweets. Maybe that's what a hashtag is for. If it has a hashtag for our class, they'll read it, but have some respect. I think that the collective pressure made the students say, ÒOkay, actually thin tweets don't have that much to say, why are we doing thin tweets?Ó
At the same time, I had a couple students do deceptively thin tweets. It was wonderful. They showed that by doing a thin tweet, there was actually-- I mean, it's a very interesting practice. Can you ever have one level of information? It's almost impossible. It really is. What they were doing, a couple students, very deliberately, were writing seemingly thin tweets that actually contained a ton of information, almost like an onion in different levels. I thought it was super creative. We need to have classroom conversations about it.
Matthew: Wow.
David: Yes.
Matthew: Now, I think I have a couple more questions for you. One is one of the things that about something Twitter that I think is very different from many other, not all, but many other mediums that we're used to engaging with, is it's, I don't know how to word it differently. It's a little bit stream of consciousness. I get enough tweets on my feed a day, that if I skip a day where I'm not using Twitter, I'm never going to read it. Right? Because now I'm 500 tweets behind. I'm not even going to skim them. Right? I'm just going to the top.
I don't really have that in the rest of my life. It used to be with television. Right? You had to watch it in the moment, but now there's DVR. Even if, I can stop. Right? I'm wondering if there's anything about that stream of consciousness aspect of it. You really have to go with the flow. It depends on who you are and how many people you're following, and all of that. You probably can't ignore it for very long. Otherwise, it becomes a bit of a task to get up to speed. Is there anything about that structure of Twitter that has an impact that you know of in terms of how students use it or how you use it? And it may have no impact.
David: Yes. Short answer, I don't know. I'd be really interested in studies on that, if you know about something like that. I do think just superficially, I do think it's an interesting model to work with because this is students' reality right now, that we often, some of us might have cable and we might have two or three newspapers, we may have one newspaper. Students right now are completely understand what it means to be overwhelmed by information. I think Twitter in the classroom, again, in a media studies classroom, especially a social media classroom, it becomes a very interesting vehicle to talk about these issues of information overload, information streams.
That said, it's also fascinating to see that in many classes, even though they have different interests; music, food, politics, some things rise to the top. I remember it happened in one class when Ferguson happened. It was impossible to ignore that. It was fascinating to see, even though we're in this flood of information, important bits get through sometimes. That's one thing I would note. The second thing is the classic hash tag. I think the hashtag, for people who don't understand the hashtag, it must look silly. For people who understand it, it's such a powerful tool.
Very often, knowing that my students may be following hundreds of people and writing many texts a day, for the important assignments, they have to use a hashtag. Maybe it'll be #mediastudies100 or #goldengateparkclass. And the reason we do that is because I love the idea that I'm not going to be able to see all of their writing. I tell them that, welcome to my reality. Only dishonest professors actually believe they can witness all of their studentsÕ work. There's a time it just doesn't happen.
With Twitter, I say, if this is something thatÕs really important for your project too, when you tweet up your project, when you say, ÒHere's my project too, I want to hashtag so all of us can see it.Ó Number three, is that we also learn different devices to manage our Twitter accounts. I think that what's great about educational technology too, is that gone are the days where we're all just going to our laptops to check Twitter or just our phone. We're going to TweetDeck and these different kinds of things, which allow us to put all of the 15 members of the class into this one columns, they're able to see it. It's another way of managing information.
In some ways, all of my classes are about managing and creating information. They're almost all about information literacy. For me, the information literacy with something like Twitter becomes, can the student find and use Twitter to find interesting information, to find interesting people? Can they use Twitter to manage information? Can they use Twitter to navigate these streams of information? These are all information literacy questions. They just happen to be on Twitter.
Matthew: Fantastic. Well, I think my last question for you today and I may think of some questions later. We might have to do a part two, is I remember at one point you mentioned to me, ÒI don't use Twitter the same in all classes,Ó which makes intuitive sense. That's probably true for most of us how there's not like one thing we do with all our classes and exactly the same way. I'm wondering for illustration and I know this may be a little hard for you to do off the top of your head, but for illustration, could you give an example of a class where of two classes, but where the use of Twitter is the most different between those two, just so we have a sense of the different ways you might use it?
I've taught high school through doctoral students. Part of how I differentiate is depending on age level maturity at times, and obviously, it's partly content and partly demands the course, and there's a bunch of things, but I don't know what makes that distinction in your mind. How it plays out in reality, what it looks like to the students in terms of the different uses.
David: Great. Let me try to begin by answering this question by saying I'm not even sure if I'm going to be using Twitter this fall. Here, I've spent all this time saying how much I use Twitter and how wonderful it's been. I'm wondering if we've seen the peak of Twitter, not the P. I don't care about the market share, I don't care about the stock share of Twitter, I'm talking about students' use of Twitter. I hate to say this gasp, Twitter, there's platforms out there that are cooler than Twitter. Just like five years ago, when I announced to my students we're going to do blogs and they saw-- I heard all these yarns. I'm wondering if we've seen the kind of end of Twitter.
I think right now, it seems to me that the two things that our students are using, I'm sure this will change in a year, is Instagram and Snapchat. I've never used Snapchat in the classroom and it seems to me all about privacy, not public. I don't know how I would use that. Instagram, I love for many reasons and use it, but it's nowhere near the power that you get with something like flicker, and so it's difficult. I want to say this publicly, is that as I get older as a professor, I need to think about my own comfort zones.
I think it's one thing for when I was a young graduate student or really young assistant professor saying, "We're going to use all these cool hip technologies." It's quite another for me to ask the students to let me come along into their social media worlds. It's very difficult. I'm really negotiating that. That's a long prelude to what I'm going to talk about, but I do want to say that, that I'm still trying to figure out if I can still get the same bang for my buck with Twitter in a classroom.
How do I use Twitter in a classroom, especially two examples of very different ones? Let's say the first one I teach a class or I have taught in the past a class called Digital Media Production. In media studies, we have a number of production classes. We have print journalism, we have video, we have audio. I developed this class called Digital Media Production, which is ambiguously titled to cover everything social media, everything internet related and anything that's digital.
I love the class and I have the students work with and are introduced to about 8 or 9, or 10 different platforms. From Google Maps, to Flicker and Instagram, to Wikipedia. The idea, pedagogically, is to have them learn how to learn, because most of the media studies students, their first job, they'll get hired as managing the social media networks. I tell my students, if you're in an interview and you don't know how to use a platform, say that you did and then take the 20 minutes or two hours it takes to learn how to do that.
This classroom, it it's just I'm constantly piling them on. For Thursday's class, learn all the ins and outs of Flicker and come to class, great. With a class like that, everything they do go through Twitter, everything they do. If I ask them to do 10 photographs of a Friday night, which is a wonderful assignment, they'll tweet it up. They will tweet a link to that. If I say take photographs throughout your weekend, but only share one that you think is absolutely beautiful, tweet that up.
Or those kinds of things, but everything we do, sorry, we do a whole bunch of stuff and then I have them edit it. I don't want them to share all of their stuff. It's just like any other class, don't give me your first draft, do all kinds of iterations then when it's presentable, have it presented on a platform, but tweeted. That's the heavy use class. For class I taught, I taught a class making food, making media in environmental studies and in urban agriculture last semester. It was fascinating because it was mostly urban ag students and they weren't very digitally literate.
They all have Instagram, they all have Facebook. They know how to use this stuff, but they haven't really thought about it that much for how to use it professionally and strategically. What I noticed was that the students, I would have an assignment, like go to a farmer's market, find a seasonal vegetable, take it home, find five recipes, select the best one, cook it, share it with a friend or a loved one, or a family member and take at least five photographs of this process, and then come back to class.
Usually, it seems like, ÒWow, that's awesome.Ó It's a lot of work. What I just said. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of fun. It's an engaging assignment. Some students discover that, ÒWow, I can also have a photograph of the nice bottles of wine we had with the meal.Ó It's a very social project. There's so much going into that assignment. What the students said early on is that some of the students felt that by having to tweet it or having, they called it a virtual element, took away from the tangible element.
They said, here they've cooked this wonderful meal and some of the students were having anxiety about taking a photograph of it. I talked to them about it and we discussed it, and I got the feedback that the digital's too much. I started scaling back on the Twitter and actually, the assignments towards the middle of the class and towards the end of the class, we all but stopped using Twitter. It was all voluntary. It just wasn't part of the class. I think that we would do that in most of our classes, if we've recognized that a book that we assigned is just not going to work at what point do we ditch it? At what point?
It's probably not the best example of the question you're asking, but I listened to the class and they said that Twitter wasn't enhancing the pedagogy. We eliminated it and we just got rid of it.
Matthew: That's a great example.
David: Okay, good. Yes.
Matthew: David, well, thank you so much. I've asked the best questions I could in the moment and maybe one of those things that something pops up later, but this is really valuable for other people, because as faculty members, many people use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and blah, blah, blah. But the thinking of social media for a pedagogical purpose, a lot of us haven't thought about it in that way, and really, even by the time some people hear this, there may be something else besides Twitter.
I think the platform is one thing, but I think what will continue is the ability of people to communicate easily, quickly and in a short amount of time will stay. I'm starting to think about how can we take advantage of that and complain about that for pedagogical reasons. It's worthy of us contemplating. I'm sure it doesn't fit for all courses, but what you've said today has me rethinking how I do certain things in my courses and how I could enhance them a little bit. I really appreciate this very much.
David: Great. Great. Thank you very much. Can I add one more thing?
Matthew: Sure.
David: That is just what you said about the ease and the quickness about communication, what I also like and I think that this is not platform centric, is this notion of our students sharing their work with a larger audience. Once a year, my students do pop-ups in Thacher Gallery and Gleeson Library. Our Urban Ag students do farm stands in the middle of Gleeson Plaza. We had this Creativity Day. There is something about students showing work outside of their community, where they have to explain their premises and they have to explain their arguments, and I think that is so valuable.
Not just because it gets the ideas that you discuss in the classroom outside, in the community, but because it forces the students to explain his or her work to a greater community. Whether that's Twitter or a pop-up exhibit, it doesn't really matter. I think that process is what matters.
Matthew: Absolutely. Dave, thank you so much.
David: Thank you.
[00:41:49] [END OF AUDIO]


File name: Silver-on-Twitter.mp3
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