November 5, 2009
DENVER — Do Twitter skeptics really believe the popular microblogging service offers no educational value, or are they just afraid of it?
For W. Gardner Campbell, director of the Academy of Teaching and Learning at Baylor University, there is no question that fear of straying from the status quo has inhibited the development of Twitter as a teaching tool. “I go to conferences like Open Education 2009, and I come back with T-shirts like this: ‘Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute,’ ” he said Wednesday at the annual Educause conference here. “And all it adds up to is more punishment at the hands of well-meaning, sometimes, but ultimately self-preserving institutional structures.”
Of course, they/we are afraid of it. As we are afraid of Facebook and powerpoint and everything else that wasn't part of the educational experience when we were law students. Our slavish desire to preserve our nostalgia-drenched past ("when law school was really rigorous"; "when there weren't any of these silly modernizations", etc etc) leads us to blindly close our eyes to the fact that it ain't 1970 or 1980 any more.
Not quoting the obvious The Times They Are a-Changing here, but the more on point (my friend and colleague Richard Sherwin used this at a talk a few years ago and its perfection has always resonated:
something's happening/
And you don't know what it is/
Do you, [Professor] Jones?
Posted by: Prof. Michael Perlin | November 05, 2009 at 09:26 AM