Twitter Field Trips

Rationale: The heart of this activity is: fostering a culture of learning while collaboratively constructing collective knowledge. The database created can be accessed later in the course of study to further understanding. As participants scroll through the back channel, tweeting is modeled for them by their peers. Even though experience with both the Twitter platform and student levels of prior content knowledge are varied, when novices interact with more knowledgeable others, all students are rewarded by becoming a part of the knowledge-building community.  This successful collaboration takes place due, in part, to valuing the diverse insights from all participants, each of whom is working at her own pace toward building an individual understanding.

Implementation: We have experimented with this for the past couple years and have learned that clear expectations for rigorous discourse makes a strong impact on the level of observations, connections, and interactions. Before the most successful trips to Selma, we've found it to have been helpful to do a "Twitter practice" assignment on campus. We have also experimented with including guests from the community at large, such as local senior citizens, students from other classes, student family members, professors or other university personel, etc. We have learned that including guest community members can enrich the experience, but there is a max on the number of guests (and/or the authority level of those guests) beyond which participation suffers. We suspect it is due to a threat to the sense of "safety" forming within the existing learning community.

At first glance, the tweets may not knock your socks off, but when you stop to think that these comments are done  on the fly, in a highly stimulating real world environment,  you begin to realize that it is a very rich learning experience.

In looking at the feed, “#USASelma –A Field trip In The Footsteps Of Freedom,” we can readily see that students are cognitively active in making sense of their observations; working them out in their thoughts  so that they can then produce coherent representations of them within the confines of 140 character tweets. Not only do students evaluate and juxtapose their new observations within the context of their prior knowledge, they also integrate it with the communal knowledge being constructed with peers in the twitter chat. Review of the chat also indicates that students work to transfer their understanding to other contexts.