the difference between thin and thick tweets

this semester, i introduced my students to twitter and offered them my definitions for thin and thick tweets:

thin tweets are posts that convey one layer of information. thick tweets convey two or more, often with help from a hyperlink.

twitterers post thin tweets all the time. for example:

i'm grumpy today

oh snap, it's raining again

need more coffee

am about to leave for the post office

i luv cottage cheese

i encourage my students to use and experiment with twitter in any and all ways they see fit and this can of course include thin tweets. but when using twitter to fulfill one of my assignments, i require my students to post thick tweets.

thick tweets convey two or more layers of information. they often, but not always, include a hyperlink that takes readers from twitter to another source of information - a newspaper article, a blog post, a flickr set, a video. i encourage my students to use 140 characters or less to compose a thick tweet that is so compelling that no reader in his or her right mind can avoid clicking the link.

here's a few examples of thick tweets written by students in my digital media production and eating san francisco classes:


in this post, stephanienow gives a shout out to ESF, announces that her north beach project is ready for viewing, tempts us with recipes, informs us that she has a new blog, and supplies a link for us to visit. awesome: a thick tweet comprised of at least five layers of information.


here, smhz tells us about a trip to costa rica he took last month and encourages us to visit the pictures he recently posted. but i'd suggest a third layer. too often, twitterers tweet the present - sam suggests that past material (a past trip to costa rica) makes for a perfectly suitable present project (a flickr set). three layers of information.


in this thick tweet, teresacgarcia sends a shout out to ESF, tells us that she just viewed the film like water for chocolate, informs us that gleeson library has the film (borrow it for free!), and notifies us when it will be available for others. terrific: four layers of information.


in my final example, melstrikesback tells us that she'll be attending an academy awards gala, links to the event so that interested readers can learn more, and thanks the foghorn (USF's student newspaper, where melstrikesback works as scene editor) for the complimentary tix. three layers of information.

as i wrote above, i encourage my students to use twitter in any way they see fit. but my bias is evident. by requiring them to post thick tweets and by encouraging them to pack multiple layers of information within 140 characters or less, i'm trying to teach my students how to craft creative, meaty, and to-the-point messages that attract other people's attention.

plus, i'm politely suggesting that they may wish to think twice about tweeting their luv of cottage cheese.

teaching with technology 2.0

the first time i taught college students was in 1995, when i was a teaching assistant for professor mary corbin sies' class material aspects of american life at the university of maryland. a year earlier, mary and professor jo paoletti received a grant from the university to add technology to their classes. so along with fellow teaching assistant pysche williams, i was tasked to brainstorm ways we could integrate this new tool called the world wide web into the course curriculum.


in place of traditional papers turned over privately to the professor, students in material aspects of american life designed "homepages," or personal web sites, and shared their research them publicly onto the internet. it was an incredibly powerful learning experience - for me, for the students, and for the professor. it was also, in retrospect, an incredibly time-consuming experience.

in addition to teaching about material culture, we had to teach the students (and often ourselves) five new things. we taught them html, which took us about an hour or so. we taught them pico text editor and basic file management, which took us about an hour or two. and we taught them ftp, which took us about an hour, plenty of headaches, and an occasional extra office hour.

in addition to, and perhaps even more than, these more technical skills, we taught them more behavioral skills. we taught them how to write for the web - to think before you publish, to consider what was appropriate within an academic setting, to understand what they were creating could and most likely would remain online beyond the duration of the class, and to take responsibility for the work you make public. and, finally, we taught them how to read for the web - to read other students' work, to take some time to think about how their peers could improve their work, and to relay those comments back to their peers.

this thursday, students in digital media production will demo their first projects. the projects are being built with and presented via facebook. this semester, all of my students are on facebook. this means that all of my students know how to design profiles, create content, upload and share photographs, comment, tag, blog, and micro-blog for a public/semi-public audience. and this means that here in 2009 i'll spend zero minutes of class time teaching students how to use the tools necessary for project one.

the heart of campus is its library

digital journalism continues to grow and the students continue to impress me. things feel significantly ramped up - we have a group blog, students are blogging independently, and students (and others!) are leaving interesting comments here and there. and today one student, eva, asked if she and others can blog about stuff i didn't assign. my answer, in two simple words, was: hell yes!

our domain is USF campus. so ... imagine a google map of a college campus spread over a few blocks in the middle of san francisco. now imagine pins stuck on various campus buildings, green areas, residence halls, recreational facilities, and spaces for reflection. finally, imagine each of these pins being clickable so that users are hyperlinked to student designed and written blog posts, flickr sets, and video about particular portions of campus.

can't imagine it? well, i can. but, much more importantly - i think my students can imagine it. for the most part, i am impressed with my students' ability to keep up with weekly readings, lesson plans, and new media tasks while simultaneously being able to think about the bigger picture, the bigger vision, of the course. i suspect that my students understand that once we learn some basic tools we can create cool stuff. now if only they would stop arriving late to class ...

we began with the heart of campus - gleeson library. fortunately for us, gleeson library currently features an outstanding exhibit on graphic novels curated by USF librarians kathy woo and debbie benrubi. as a class, we visited the library, took pictures with our digital cameras and cellphones, and interviewed librarians involved in the exhibit. (students enrolled in digital journalism have already taken journalism 1, either with teresa moore or michael robertson, so they already have basic reporting, interviewing, and writing skills.) finally, before leaving they were required to select at least one graphic novel and check it out from the library.

the assignment that followed was simple: blog about the exhibit in gleeson library. i asked my students to cover a particular angle of the exhibit, to make their blog posts fascinating, and to include at least one image, one hyperlink, and a bunch of tags. finally, i asked them to integrate - somehow, someway - their graphic novel into their blog posts.

true journalists, my students posted their blog entries minutes before deadline. we spent today talking about and critiquing each others' blog posts. my students are nice and polite and directed most of their time towards what they liked, not disliked, about their fellow students' blog posts. but when critiques did arise students were really receptive and took them in.

the semester is still young but so far i remain impressed.

spring semester around the corner

spring semester begins on monday and i'll be teaching two classes: digital journalism and media internship. i hope to blog about both courses throughout spring semester. i spent a lot of winter break thinking, brainstorming, and reading books and blogs about digital journalism and the syllabus is nearly finished!

students enrolled in digital journalism can expect to learn about web-based tools for gathering and assessing news and stories (like blogs, RSS, and wikis). students can also expect to learn about web-based tools for creating and distributing news and stories (like blogs, flickr, facebook, and youtube).

we'll be reading two books (plus a packet with all kinds of goodies). the first is dan gillmor's we the media: grassroots journalism by the people, for the people (o'reilly media, 2006; but also here for free). the second is kevin howley's community media: people, places, and communication technologies (cambridge university press, 2005).

at this point, the class has seven students, the perfect number, i think, for a group blog. one of my teaching goals this semester is to learn more about how to encourage students to both blog and comment on fellow students' blogs. i know i can assign this, but i'm hoping it will happen organically instead. i want them to post because they want to, not because they have to.

students will be required to learn - in class, out of class, alone, and in groups - many web-based tools including atlas, blogs, facebook, flickr, RSS, wikipedia, and youtube. some of these tools i know well; some less so; some none. i hope it will be a real each one, teach one learning environment.

i'm excited about using atlas and spent a portion of yesterday taking pictures of campus so that i could test the new atlas feature ... multiple pin colors! in the map below, red pins represent photographs of USF buildings (and a bench); green pins signify green spaces. (please note: last night, when i put together the map, the images and hyperlinks were working; this morning, strangely, everything is broken; i'll fix later.)



one of the many things i like about working with digital maps is the ease of scaling. i like, for example, how you can mouseclick the "-" button (on the left side of the map) to get a view of USF campus, the panhandle, golden gate park, the city, the bay area, etc. i like how you can continue to click to see california, the west coast, north america, earth. the very process is, i believe, pedagogical; it teaches.

i hope other classes with other students will map other campuses. on tuesday, i drove down to palo alto to meet with my friends and stanford university librarians, shinjoung yeo and james jacobs (of, among many things, freegovinfo.info and radical reference), and howard rheingold, who, in addition to being author of this and this and this, is also teaching digital journalism this year at stanford. i hope we'll do something jointly in the near future. i think it would be great to have teams of students from all over san francisco and the bay area annotating their campuses, their neighborhoods, their city.

but first things first - i still need to finish my syllabus.

duboce park, atlas, and digital journalism

from two great posts over at innovation in college media, i learned about atlas. created by journalists and web developers at faneuil media, atlas is a free web-based mapping tool that is incredibly easy to use. with atlas, you can create a map and annotate it with text, images, and links. similar to youtube, you can easily embed atlas maps into blog posts.

i have been playing with atlas for the last few days and am happy with how easy it is to use. this afternoon i used atlas to create this map of the nice walk i took this morning in nearby duboce park.



as i play more and more with atlas, i begin to think of all kinds of public art, public history, and public engagement applications. i think of how someone like my friend kelly quinn could and would use something like this. but for now, staying as disciplined as i can be during winter break, i'm brainstorming ways that we'll use atlas in my spring semester course - digital journalism.