Would it be considered OK for a professor to require students to “follow” them? Not for the purpose of receiving class materials, just to know about relevent events in the teacher’s life.
Does twitter have appropriateness rules?
Maybe the question should be…“Is this an appropriate assignment by a professor?”
Sure, why not?
I could see it making an interesting class experiment for a sociology class. Although you’d probably want to define the parameters of it a lot better and include more than one feed.
Otherwise, I can’t see how it’s relevant to learning. Can’t say as I would care what kind of muffin the prof had for breakfast. Also, does the prof know how Twitter works? The odds of me seeing even one tweet a day from one specific person are minimal. If you didn’t happen to tweet within about 5 minutes of when I happened to look at my stream, I’ll miss it. It wouldn’t even be that effective as a means of distributing class materials. And I think doing homework and learning stuff is a bit more important than hanging out on Twitter all day.
A teacher’s requiring students to follow to a twitter account about their personal life seems really weird and somewhat indicative of boundary issues.
In contrast, a teacher’s having a twitter feed where they tweet links to articles and websites relevant to the subject matter that they teach and letting students know about it does seem an appropriate use of twitter.
I’ve had several classes where we had a class-wide hashtag that we were instructed to follow using whatever means necessary to catch them. The professor used that hashtag when there was something pertinent to share with the class, and we were responsible for getting that information just like we were from the texts and live sessions and etc. We as students were also required to submit a certain number of links and trending topics to the hashtag for part of our “class participation” grade.
Perhaps this professor is confusing following and hashtagging?
Or the professor is narcissistic.
Or, (just thought of this) perhaps the prof has been instructed by a department overlord to indicate that they are a popular and “available” teacher, and having lots of student twitter followers seems a quick and easy and generally painless (on both sides of the relationship) method of indicating that to the superiors?
A professor can use any text they want, and a Twitter feed is just a specialized source of text.
Knowledge professionals, such as professors, typically have Twitter feeds that focus on resources and commentary relevant to the field. My professional Twitter feed focuses on highlighting new industry reports, linking to very insightful blog posts, pointing out helpful resources, career development tools, newly published research and conversations and debates about the major issues and trends in my field.
A Twitter feed like that is completely appropriate. Indeed, cultivating and monitoring a good set of career-specific Twitter feeds is one of the best ways to stay on the bleeding edge of your field. Following a professor’s Twitter feed could be a good start towards higher engagement with the field, and working Twitter can be a way for a budding professional to get their name out there.
Of course if the feed is just cat pictures and mundane updates, it’s less relevant.
:smack: The latter is what the prof would use the feed for.
Your 1st paragraph is the use I was thinking of.
BTW all-this was merely hypothetical.
It sounds fine for a college professor to do it. A high school teacher, probably not so much. I had a sociology professor that made us do all kinds of weird things. I assume that there will be some content relevant to the class but, even if there is not, a college professor can still ask almost anything they want of their students with certain obvious exceptions.
Oh, well that completely changes my answer then. Of course it’s relevant, if the information in the stream is relevant to the class topic.
When you mentioned “events in the professor’s life” I thought you meant tweets like, “At sis’s wedding. Best man on his way to drunk. Cousin Flora shakin’ it on the dance floor.” Tweeting industry articles is nothing like tweeting “this is my life” trivia.
Creating a hashtag stream is a good idea. So is keeping up on one’s industry by following a bunch of people in it. I do exactly that already. Hell, it can be a great way to network.
Sounds useful to me.
If I knew my Thermodynamics professor was severely constipated that morning I would know I would be having an especially bad day in that class and I could at least brace myself with some Tequila and Zanex.