Wed 22 Apr 2009
This isn’t really about the product we just launched. It is a fun experiment that hopes to illustrate the core belief of SmartCrowds - how little bits of contribution from people can add up to something valuable, and how technology is powering new ways of living and working. Wiki enabled the brilliant WikiPedia. We’re tinkering with what Twitter can do.
We think Twitter is a great platform for distance learning.. We can’t say for sure about all the types of distance learning that it enables… we’re still tinkering (What do you think?)… but something that can be delivered in byte-sized chunks is ideal…. For example, something like “learn kannada in 30 days” or “learn urdu a phrase a day”… The latter is what we’re going to try. It was inspired by the love for the language of course, and not as a random experiment. That helps keep the momentum :).
While the “Urdu class” we’re starting will be asynchronous and in small daily chunks, I can easily imagine a live class being conducted on twitter. One or more “teachers” can post to “http://twitter.com/Urdu101″ on a schedule and the “students” (followers in twitter terminology) get the gyan in real time. The students can ask questions in real time by responding to a particular “140-byte lesson”, and the teacher can ReTweet it so that all the students can see it at the same time. The beauty of it is that this class can be attended later at any time, anywhere, and using a variety of delivery mechanisms. By the same account, one can imagine a teacher conducting “office hours” for students anywhere on the globe.
There’s one small technical limitation with twitter currently. Multiple teachers have to share a password to post to one twitter account. With delegated administration support on twitter, or using some other innovations that exist or may come up in the near future, we can prevent the sharing of one password. Any ideas?.
We hope you’ll head on to http://twitter.com/Urdu101, sign up as a follower to learn Urdu a phrase at a time, and post your own knowledge through responses (which I will retweet for the benefit of all followers).
Share your thoughts, ideas on how twitter can be used for distance learning.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:43 am
tweeting videos to twitter complements this. Perfect combo. Was doing something around this a couple of days back (http://tweetube.appspot.com/). It should start working in a couple of days.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:01 am
sounds cool.. would love to try it when its ready
April 27th, 2009 at 3:06 am
Hi
Nice idea!…is there anything as “collaborative tweeting” …Would really love to contribute
April 27th, 2009 at 3:17 am
Suhel, What we have is a poor man’s version of collaborative tweeting. Lets say you follow Urdu101, and you want to post an update for all other followers. You would respond to some update on Urdu101, and I would retweet it which will make it visible to all the followers (including yourself…). I hope there will be better ways going forward (e.g. I’d love to delegate the access for “posting an update” on Urdu101 to a few individuals).
Nice to have you on Urdu101… spread the word
(ReTweet is a good way to spread it to your twitter followers).