The Chronicle of Higher Education reported how a professor encouraged his students to contribute to his ‘live’ classes via Twitter.

It did not work at first, but after a few weeks, they started

floating ideas or posting links to related materials… in some cases, a shy student would type an observation or question on Twitter, and others in the class would respond with notes encouraging the student to raise the topic out loud. Other times, one of the professors would see a link posted by a student and stop class to discuss it.

Why did he do this?

He replied that his hope is that the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls.

Bravo! I might just do something like this next semester. Perhaps I’ll encourage my teacher trainees to tweet more than blog. For that matter, I think I may require them to maintain small group blogs rather than individual ones.