The 90-person lecture hall was too large and would not be good for a real conversation between a professor and her students. Especially for a class like history. To address the problem, Monica Rankin, a history professor at the University of Texas-Dallas, looked for a more effective way to get her students involved class. Her solution: Twitter, a micro-blogging service. Rankin asked her students set up Twitter accounts and then use their accounts to ask questions and leave messages. These were then show to the class by way of a projector screen. Rankin says that despite the disadvantages of the technology they are using, the experiment has successfully instilled encouragement among her students, enough for them to want to participate in class.

In a related story, marketing and online business professor Elaine Young of Champlain College in Vermont uses Twitter as a tool in classroom teaching aw well as a means for business and marketing students to use in building connections and networks while out in the real world of professionals. Twitter allows people to send “tweets”, or messages of up to 140 characters, that can be seen by anyone online.

David Parry, a professor of emerging media at the University of Texas-Dallas, believes that Twitter enhances his classes with instant-access information. He sees the technology as a way of getting his students involved in the course, even when they are outside the classroom. Like Rankin, Parry asked his students to come up with their own Twitter accounts so they can follow his updates. Quite a number of his students even make use of the site to inform their classmates about world events and issues that they feel are important and related to their course.

A former student of Parry who works at the UT Southwestern Medical Center, has even used Twitter to help make a kidney transplant possible. During the six-hour transplant procedure, the patient’s family members had the opportunity to follow updates and developments through the regular postings on Twitter.

One of the early users of Twitter for teaching was University of California-Berkeley’s Howard Rheingold. He uses the site to get hold of teaching advices. A social media professor, he uses Twitter in carrying out a “student-to-teacher-to-student ambient office hours.”