Blog about Twitter

Twitter is so different than any other form of social networking or online communication. First of all, the most unique aspect of Twitter is that you are limited to 140 characters per post. This is an excellent thing because it forces people to get to their point quickly as well as be concise. On BlackBoard, I often find that people go overboard sometimes in their post (myself included!) and this can be annoying for other people who have to read the post. Sometimes, the posts are extremely long and wordy because people think that making a post longer will benefit them in some way. On BlackBoard, you are usually not limited to the amount of words you can use and this can create problems. Further, commenting on BlackBoard can be a pain. On Twitter, it is so easy to respond to people and have a quick back and forth conversation about a post. I find that on BlackBoard people usually don't respond to comments that others write on their post, but on Twitter I feel that many more people engage in an interactive conversation because of the easiness and quickness to using Twitter.  Of course, an in-class discussion is completely different. There are benefits to having an in-person discussion and mainly that is you can see and read facial expressions as well as tone of voice. This allows for a completely different understanding of what someone is trying to say than reading a post online. It is often difficult to convey emotions in a post and feelings are not always made clear. It is hard to portray sarcasm and it can be difficult for the reader to get the full picture of what the author wants to say. On the other hand, in an in-class discussion if you want to respond to what someone says it has to be immediate and that can be hard. Sometimes, you need time to think and contemplate how you want to respond to someone and you don't really have that opportunity. On Twitter, or BlackBoard, you can take as much time as needed to think about what you want to comment and you can formulate your thoughts into a coherent comment. I often find that when people respond and have a conversation in class, it can be heated and people may say things that they don't really mean. It is also sometimes difficult to discern what someone is trying to say if their thoughts have not been fully formulated. Of course, there are positive and negatives aspects of both online discussions as well as in-person discussions. I think that each one has its own purpose and it really depends what the goal of the assignment would be. What I do like about having a Twitter discussion or on Blackboard is that everyone must participate as opposed to an in class discussion where a lot of students just don't take part in.