Teaching with Twitter, Semester 2

This is going to be my second blog post about using Twitter in the classroom; I’ve also done a couple of guest posts on the subject (my first is here and there’s another one here). There will be a third wrap-up post in the coming weeks, as soon as I have the results of the online course evaluation process from “Truth and Progress,” the contemporary political theory course from this past semester in which I made use of Twitter.

But, while I’m waiting for those evaluations, I wanted to type up a few words about the next steps in my experimentation since I couldn’t quite decide whether to take a break from Twitter or save Twitter for this class alone. Having thought about it for a few weeks — and since I’m feeling pretty confident about the way things unfolded this past semester — I’ve decided to try it again with a different class.

The class this semester is called “Human Rights in Theory and Practice” and it’s an upper-level political science class that combines political thought and international relations. We’ll use Twitter in a similar way to the way we used it last semester — I’ll toss out questions a couple of times a week and we’ll get a conversation going between the students and various interested followers — but the questions will be quite different. My assumption is that there will likely be more discussion this time around because the topic — human rights and the puzzle of reconciling global norms with local practices — seems a good deal less specialized and, thus, a good deal more accessible to those who aren’t sitting in the classroom.

For those who are interested — and I hope that many of you will be interested, actually — you can find the class Twitter account here. If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, maybe this will convince you to sign up and follow along. If you’ve already got an account, then you know how these things work and you might even have followed along with last semester’s class. We’ll tag all of our Twitter updates with the hashtag #pols470 so you should be able to search for and find a running list of the on-going discussion once it gets going after the first day of class on January 11.

What’s more, we’re also going to be blogging with a fair amount of regularity as a component of the class. You can find the blog here; it’s up and running right now, but you likely won’t find anything there for a few more weeks. You can subscribe to the blog itself and get updates using a newsreader or you can find out about updates via Twitter, as students will be encouraged to notify the class whenever they write a new blog post.

There’s going to be a lot going on this semester, both in the classroom and online. If you’re interested in human rights or just like the idea of spending some time in one of my classes, you’ll be very welcome to follow along and discuss these topics with us.