Just before the start of spring term, a friend and colleague in journalism sent an e-mail message to our department: Technology had changed, she wrote; perhaps our reporting curriculum should change with it. She planned to teach with a focus on live blogging and Twitter, and suggested that those students not particularly interested in using the new technology should be tracked into the other reporting class.
That is, my reporting class–one in which we emphatically would not use Twitter.
For those not in the know, Twitter is a microblogging service that allows members to report on what they’re seeing, thinking, and feeling by posting comments that are limited to just 140 characters each. You can subscribe to someone’s Twitter feed and receive what are called “tweets”–brief bits of information like “Sat through another of Prof. Hart’s interminable lectures on the glories of literary nonfiction.”