Christopher Allen

"This is instructive for designers of educational technology. The “traditional” trajectory of educational technology is specialization and feature-creep. For example, a class must have an email list, a forum, website/CMS, each with its own space and identity. When I log into BlackBoard, I see about 30 different things I can do, and for each I have to click a link and go to a page to do the action. Twitter strips away the features, instead using an inherently flexible textual space to facilitate communication, accomplishing the same goal of other feature-ridden “course technology.” - Christopher Allen

"David Parry, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, talks about using Twitter, a new messaging service, for his courses." - Christopher Allen

"Dr. Rankin, professor of History at UT Dallas, wanted to know how to reach more students and involve more people in class discussions both in and out of the classroom. She had heard of Twitter... She collaborated with the UT Dallas, Arts and Technology - Emerging Media and Communications (EMAC) http://www.emac.utdallas.edu faculty and as a Graduate student in EMAC I assisted her in her experiment. I documented the experiment for a digital video class with Professor Dean Terry, @therefore, and assisted Dr. Rankin in the experiment as a part of my collaboration and content creation course with Dan Langendor, @dlangendorf. It was a real pleasure to work with Dr. Rankin - a forward-thinking professor open to the intelligent use of new media. - Christopher Allen

"I actually had not considered it as a tool for education until I saw a link posted by Twittown to a blog post on that subject. Doing a little online searching (emphasis on the little), I found the following items related to Twitter and education." - Christopher Allen