Microblogging as a literacy practice for educational communities

Mills, Kathy A., & Chandra, Vinesh. (2011). Microblogging as a literacy practice for educational communities. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(1), 35-45.

I’ve been slow to embrace some of the most recent social networking tools. As of this moment, I have yet to Twitter, and you will not find me on Facebook. Once in a while, out of curiosity or an immediate need for an information tidbit, I “lurk” on those networks, but so far I have not really participated on them, though many people I know do so on a daily basis. Obviously, I’ve overcome my original trepidations about blogging, but for some reason, I hold back from using tools that enable the briefer, more immediate communications the authors here call “microblogging.” Why do I resist? Is it because of the same old fears and uncertainties that I’ve eventually managed to get beyond where technology use is concerned, or do these new tools bring out new fears and uncertainties? Could I ever see microblogging as a viable teaching tool, as Australian teacher educators Mills and Chandra have with the preservice teachers they work with?

Microblogging involves very short, necessarily concise communications of 140 characters or fewer (though users may make multiple such posts in a short time). Mills and Chandra describe these kinds of brief communications as “literacies in a digital age” which have “immediacy, community, interactivity, and transparency” (p. 35). Such communications could be dynamic, engaging, and intensely democratic in that everyone’s contributions have a chance to be “heard”. The ongoing texts resulting from these social media appear to be truly co-constructed. The problem is, they are really so terribly public, and along with that comes a certain amount of risk. I’m not talking about the well-known kinds of risks from the accessibility of the Internet to all kinds of people in the world, some of whom have self-serving or even evil motives. Mills and Chandra propose to limit those kinds of risks by employing “secure and free microblogging platforms designed for educational communities” (p. 35). They used a platform called EDMODO, which I plan to check out soon.

For me, the risk is of a more basic nature. I guess the nub of my concern centers around this question: For communications that will be this public, and this permanent, do I really want to submit writing that is this brief, and is so close to “stream of consciousness”? Do I really want to validate and reify and disseminate every thought that comes into people’s heads? Isn’t there a danger for well-crafted, well-considered communications to become lost amid a sea of trivia? Is it all just TOO immediate, TOO interactive, TOO transparent, and in short, TOO easy to be done so publicly? Will we lose the urgency to revise and edit what we write before we publish? If the brevity required by media like Twitter leads us to think more precisely, then it could be a helpful device, almost like trying to distill an image into a brief poetic form like haiku. If brevity leads us to simply post a lot of words more often, without taking the time to hone our thinking and craft our words, I wonder about that. Free association is good for a private journal, but what happens when our words become posts which have the potential to take on lives of their own and can be transmitted worldwide, possibly eternally?

I’m trying to keep an open mind about microblogging. As technologies have emerged, my own pattern has been to experience initial fears and concerns, to overcome them by seeking information, and then to engage in cautious inquiry and experimentation, often with scaffolding in the form of the guidance of a more tech-savvy other person whose skills and judgment I trust. I currently have several of these “technology mentors”, and I plan to consult with them as I sort through what I am learning about social media and its uses for me, both personal and professional. I’ll need to reach a certain comfort level with any new technological tool, and be able to see how it will make my personal and/or professional life concretely, qualitatively better, before I embrace and fully explore the possibilities of that tool. At one point in my long technological journey, I was dubious about using e-mail. Now, only about 20 short years later, I am a blogger, send and receive numerous e-mails daily, surf the Web for all kinds of personal and professional purposes, and use an online course platform to teach my courses. Who knows? One day soon maybe I’ll be microblogging as well.