Twitter

Twitter

The 140 word constraint of Twitter demands of the user a metacognitive, disciplined use of language that forces him to condense, summarize and identify key words creatively to convey a point. Twitter could be used to stimulate thinking in class around a certain concept and record how a class discourse/languaculture is formed around the topic, what Kern calls "a participatory narrative." When students have to define a term collaboratively on Twitter, this activity provides an opportunity for foreign language students to negotiate for meaning. Blake says, "Through negotiation of meaning learners gain additional information about the language and focus their attention on particular parts of the language. This attention primes language for integration into a developing interlinguistic system." This negotiation of meaning scaffolds the class to advance to higher stages of language and cognitive ability. Twitter validates students' social home computer use while allowing for a juxtaposition of multiple perspectives, the connection "C" in the foreign language standards. I had never used Twitter before this class. I was surprised how appealing the social relationship aspect was; I didn't look just at the message, but at the sender as well. In terms of discourse analysis, the word limits challenges us to develop our specialist collocation and generates a collaborative dialogue. As individuals we interact with this dialogue, measuring thoughts of others against our own, coming to new understandings. Twitter is triglossic; users navigate several languages at once, colloquial speech, academic language and text language. This use implies a flexible use of language. Twitter combined with other literacy activities support development of multimodal digital literacy. We used GoogleDocs and Twitter plus class discussion to move between multiple texts and multiple scales. The activity we did on the last day of class was designed in a way that encouraged us to brainstorm, go back and forth between different texts, generate ideas, get immediate feedback, build mean and emotion. We experienced building a community of thinkers with a focused purpose and unique languaculture. We addressed constraints and affordances of different types of digital technology. This activity helped me synthesize many big concepts from this session in situated practice. I reformulated by ideas by working in my group on GoogleDocs, then by reading the tweets, then having the discussion. I see how combining different forms of technology helps the learner see a concept from different perspectives according to the design of the particular type of technology. My group and individual documents produced during this lesson are artifacts toward orienting to True North.