TEACHING

WITH TWITTER
"Hot dot t^'paUtt
By Jeffrey R. Young
From The Chronicle of Higher Education

often tangential, accompanies his

M
AYBE Sugato Chakravarty
should wear a helmet to
class. The professor of con-
sumer sciences and retailing at
Purdue University repeatedly at-
tempts the instructional equiva-
lent of jumping a motorcycle over
a row of flaming barrels.
Asking 250 students to post
questions on Twitter during a class
doesn't risk life or limb. But it can
cause ego damage if students get
disorderly online.
As Chakravarty paces the front
of a stadium-style lecture hall,
some students crack jokes anony-
mously in an official web forum.
The course is one of two at Purdue
testing homemade software called
Hotseat, which lets students key in
questions from their cell phones or
laptops, using Twitter or Facebook.
A constant stream of comments.
talks. An incident of cheating came
up early in the semester—a stu-
dent asked classmates for a quiz
answer. During one session, stu-
dents took over the back channel
to ask the professor to cancel class
Thanksgiving week so they could
have a longer vacation. "So with 41
votes are we not having class that
Monday of Thanksgiving?" asked
one hopeful student after others
had endorsed the sentiment. (The
class still met,)
The moment is telling. Opening
up a Twitter-powered channel in
class—which professors at other
universities are experimenting
with as well—alters classroom
power dynamics and signals to
students that they're in control.
Fans of the approach applaud tech-
nology that promises to change

Jeffrey R. Young is a senior writer forThe Chronicle of Higher Education.

Condensed, ivfi/i perm/ss/on, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, 56 fWo-
vember27,2009). A1, 10. Copyright 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The complete version of the article is available at http://chronicle.com.

March 2010 9
 THE EDUCATION DIGEST
professors' role from "sage on
the stage" to "guide on the side."
Those phrases are familiar to edu-
cation reformers, who have long
argued that education must be
more interactive to hold the inter-
est of today's students.
The unanswered question,
though, is whether that theory
can work in practice. That uncer-
Fans of the approach
applaud technology that
promises to change
professors' role from
"sage on the stage" to
"guide on the side."
tainty actually excites Chakravarty
and other daredevil professors at-
tempting this teaching trick. "You
are vulnerable out there," he said.
"Students really don't hold back.
If you say something wrong or
something that they don't agree
with, they'll let you know, and
everybody else will see it."
Many colleagues are watching
such experiments with a mix of
curiosity and disbelief to see how
the professors land.
Students seem to love the
chance to make their voices heard
in class without having to actually
speak. About 75% of the students
make use of Hotseat. even though
it is not required.
Emboldened Students
One student, Ben Van Wye, told
10 www.eddigest.com
me, "I'm not that outspoken in
class, so 1 would never ask a ques-
tion out loud to the professor. But
you can type it in as anonymous, so
nobody really knows if what you're
asking is a dumb question."
That anonymity leads to ques-
tions the professor says he never
heard before in a course he has
taught for years. But it has also
raised new issues of classroom
management.
Early in the semester, for in-
stance, there was the cheating
incident. While students were tak-
ing a short multiple-choice quiz,
a student asked his classmates—
anonymously, he thought—for an
answer via Twitter. But the way
Purdue set up its home-built soft-
ware, students must log in to use
the system. Chakravarty could
identify the student, even though
the tweet was labeled "anony-
mous" in the view that students
saw. Busted.
"So 1 called him into my office
and said, 'Don't do that, it's cheat-
ing,'" said the professor. "And he
started crying and said he'd never
do it again."
At other times, lecture topics
have been pulled in unexpected
directions. One day. the topic
was car insurance. Chakravarty
was telling students that getting
married usually lowers your insur-
ance rate when a student typed in
a clever question that caused a
teaching assistant, Adam Hagen.
to laugb out loud. The professor
 Teaching with Twitter

stopped his lecture mid sentence "That happens," said Chakra-

to ask Hagen what the students
were up to.
"There's a question here that
says, 'What happens if you get
married, and then you get divorced
at 24—would your insurance go
back up?'" said Hagen, prompting
laughter from students. The an-
swer, apparently, is no, as the TA
explained aloud to the class. "So
if you want to get married for the
sake of having lower insurance, go
right abead," he said playfully.
Though the lecture then turned
to other issues, students in tbe
course continued to joke on Hot-
seat about the idea that someone
would get married for an insurance
discount.
varty about the chatter that had
been going on under his nose. "You
bave some meaningless stuff, but
it's followed by some very good
questions tbat would never be
asked."
He usually stops his lecture a
couple of times during class to ad-
"There is certainly the
potential for disaster."
dress questions on Hotseat. At first
he stood at the lectern glancing at
the screen frequently as be spoke,
but that proved too distracting.
Asked him if he thinks the sys-
tem sbifts too much control to stu-
dents, he said students in class are

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March 2010 11
 THE EDUCATION DiGEST
online or texting on their phones
anyway, so why not try to channel
that energy to class discussion?
"To force them to behave in a cer-
tain way is not respect," he said. "If
you want respect, you have to earn
it. To mandate respect is stupid."
I asked Van Wye, the student,
whether some students end up
derailing class sessions thanks to
Hotseat. "Yeah, perhaps, because
sometimes you have people writ-
ing funny comments, and we have
to stop and kind of acknowledge
that it happened," he said. "And
sometimes that takes away from
it a little bit."
On balance, though, he would
vote to keep the software: "It does
more good than it does hurt."
Potential for Disaster?
Monica A. Rankin, an assistant
professor of history at the Univer-
sity of Texas at Dallas, ran a similar
experiment last semester, using
Twitter as a back channel during
an American-history class with 90
students.
"There is certainly the poten-
tial for disaster," she said. During
one class session about abortion,
for instance, students began an
argument on Twitter that Rankin
characterized as "nonproductive
and nonacademic." She said her
teaching assistant quickly brought
the flame war to her attention, and
"we basically changed topics at
that point."
The university produced a vid-
12 www.eddjgest.com
eo about Ms. Rankin's class that
makes Twitter seem like the next
great revolution in teaching—
it conveniently leaves out any
downsides.
Rankin made clear that she
approached Twitter cautiously—
she did wear a virtual helmet.
The ciass met three days a week,
but only one part of one session
involved the back-channel discus-
sion. "The rest was a traditional
format." she said.
Only two or three out of 90
students in the class said they had
used Twitter previously, so some
time was sapped helping them
sign up for accounts and get used
to the technology. And because
some students did not like to bring
laptops to class, and some had cell
phone plans that charged them for
each tweet, the professor decided
to offer a decidedly low-tech alter-
native: Students could write their
questions or comments on slips of
paper and hand them to the teach-
ing assistant, who then typed the
messages into Twitter.
Rankin s conclusion is that tbe
experiment went pretty well (no
real disasters), but that setting
up a back channel is not for ev-
ery professor, or every course.
"Instructors in the classroom
really have to teach toward their
personalities," she said. "Col-
leagues have told me there is no
way they would do this in their
class—this would make them un-
comfortable." •
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