Blum Center for Developing Economies
News

Daily Cal: Profs Use Twitter To Enhance Class Discussion

Blum Center
October 16, 2012
1 min

The Daily Californian, the student-run UC Berkeley paper of record, visited Prof. Ananya Roy’s “Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes In The New Millennium” class this week to explore her use of Twitter in a large lecture hall setting. According to the article:

By projecting tweets pertaining to the class on a screen, professors are able to use teaching methods that allow large groups of students to interact with one another and the professor during class.

A classroom filled with students sitting in rows, with many using laptops and taking notes. The students are engaged in the lecture, and there are bags and backpacks placed on the floor next to their seats.

The tables have turned,” said Tara Graham, director of Digital Media Projects at the Blum Center and a lecturer in the campus international and area studies department. “We’re no longer in a world where ideas are conveyed one-to-many, but now we have a many-to-many mode of communication.”

…

“What this does is that there are so many kids that are speaking up, and because we run it live, they then engage in conversation with each other in a way that’s impossible in almost any classroom,” Roy said. “This is not anymore about my simply lecturing to them; I’m curating the conversation.”

To read the full article, click here.

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