Twitter

http://twitter.com

One potential educational tool for the internet is Twitter. It is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. It was not used in this class, but my guess would be that in the next semester or two that it could be part of the curriculum. Twitter is similar to blogging, and even looks a lot like it. What really makes Twitter a potentially great distance education tool is that it can be used in a variety of ways. So, if you can't make it to your home computer, you could potentially attend an online meeting for your course on your cell phone, instant messaging with MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

What a professor or student leader could do is simply pose questions. What might make twitter a little different and more interesting then most course management chat sites is that the Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to known as followers. So your answers as a student need to be a little more direct and to the point. Not exactly the traditional method in Grad schools, but I think that is the point. What spurs out is that online discussions never really have to end, they can literally carry on through the night with updates on your cellphone.