I want to preface that while I'm calling this a livetweet, it's not actually a livetweet. I'm posting this "livetweet" having already read Adeline Koh's "Teaching with the Internet; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Google In My Classroom."

To elaborate a little further: I'm "livetweeting" this article as an alternative to posting a blog/discussion post for the class that assigned this article. Forgot to link the article earlier, but here it is: https://hybridpedagogy.org/teaching-with-the-internet-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-google-in-my-classroom/

Classroom discussion/blog posts always feel like a mediation between the forms of an organic, spontaneous blog post, and the expectations of the classroom setting. This livetweet is no different, and feels extra-inorganic because:

1) I got the idea for livetweeting from the article itself, which means that an actual livetweet of this article would've violated causality, and 2) the constraints of my situation keeps this from entirely matching the format of the classroom livetweet activity proposed by Koh.

I was tempted there to say "mimic," as in "mimicking" the livetweet format. I think this is telling insofar as I still tend to see classroom activities as "simulations" of real activities, and conduct them as such.

"Does this look like it could be a post on a real blog," I think, and I evaluate myself on my ability to match. I don't necessarily think inorganicism is a bad thing, here; perhaps learning and practice are necessarily awkward/inorganic activities. It merits awareness, though.

The article positions the convention of "the keynote speech" as one that reflects older pedagogical practices, i.e., practices that treat knowledge as though it could simply be "doled out" to students by teachers, transferred from teacher to student via lecture.

Newer pedagogy encourages more active engagement, and this article points out both how the internet generates an increasing need for an engaging pedagogy and how it can facilitate it.

Koh uses livetweeting as an example of how students can continue discussions outside the classroom, thus "break[ing] down the walls of the classroom." Students can continue following up on a Twitter class after class, and people outside the classroom can participate.

*twitter thread after class. Anyways, this feels nitpicky, but I wouldn't say the walls of the classroom are being broken down, exactly; Twitter posts "for class" are still mediated by the classroom. It feels more like we're bringing the "outside world" into the classroom.

And there are some necessarily weird dynamics that come out of that. We are encouraged to think in terms of "as though..." in the classroom. "Write as though this weren't for me, the professor, but rather for your CEO, your peers, etc."

Which leads to a kind of performing for the professor by way of performing for a fictional audience. Except, for livetweeting, this fictional audience actually IS real. So now you're performing for your prof by way of performing for a real audience.

I don't know where I'm going with that thought, but it is, as they say, A Thought. It doesn't break the purpose behind why we're livetweeting. It still enables forms of discussion that aren't available conventionally.

But I do wonder where to situate this kind of awkwardness in the context of teaching. My knowledge of pedagogy is, alas, kind of basic. Are aspects of the industrial system of education still seeping in? Are all elements of the industrial system to be excised?

(I'm reverting to the style of the traditional classroom blog post despite this being a twitter thread. Largely because that's the form I'm more comfortable with. Dammit. I put myself in this hole.)

So, having finished: this was an interesting experiment! I don't think it really worked the way a livetweet thread is supposed to work, but I wasn't really expecting it to. It's a personal practice round/prototype, etc.

So, I can definitely see this working in the (expanded) classroom! A question, though: should teachers intervene/participate in these kinds of activities? What pedagogical goals are fulfilled by including/excluding teachers from Twitter livethreads?

Actually done now!

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[looks at the fourth wall] Did I do well?

Also, Remi (and anyone else who happens to read through this thread), would you happen to have any writings that discuss ideas of classroom assignments as a kind of roleplay/fiction/storytelling? It appears that I have accidentally gone down a rabbit hole.