karen louise smith

As a teaching assistant for Information 1001 at the Toronto iSchool, I maintain a Twitter account for the course under the moniker of @ i1001. Although we are only half way through the term, the use of Twitter for the class has already been an interesting journey. The course has approximately 250 students enrolled and the Twitter account was originally envisioned as an auxiliary channel for participation and engagement. Here are some of my initial observations:

1) Creating a presence
I am the primary ‘tweeter’ for @i1001. This means I picked the photo for the account. In creating the @i100 account I was inspired by a course reading by Susan Leigh Star’s work on infrastructure and my summer visit to the Seattle Central Public Library. The image is a rainbow of RJ-45 or, Ethernet cables taken in the hallway before entering the book sorting room. In creating a presence or an identity for a course, the intention may need to be made transparent, just like infrastructure.

2) Sharing
As a tweeting TA, I share a lot of links on Twitter. Typically, I post links which extend upon concepts discussed in lecture. The benefit of being on Twitter however, is that students send links back! Course relevant YouTube links, web comics, and other resources are frequently shared by students. A rudimentary liveblog of the lecture sometimes emerges from the aggregated tweets.

3) Backchannel conversations
Some of the most interesting conversations always happen on the backchannel. Twitter is a place where questions can be asked and participation can be directed without having to speak to the entire lecture hall.

4) Getting to know each other
Tweeting for a course allows me to get to know the tweeting students a little better. What are their hobbies? What news stories peak their interests? What do they find interesting and relevant.

Having finished this blog post, I’ll now tweet it back to i1001 and introduce some new people to my blog.