Should you teach how to tweet?

For many teachers, keeping students from texting and tweeting during class is a never-ending (losing) game of Whac-a-Mole.

But one teacher decided to embrace the art form of short form communication. Andy Selsberg wrote:

I don’t expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s conversation.

He argues that teaching to write concisely is not only realistic for 21st century communication, but also allows for surprising amounts of creativity. He gave an assignment where students had to describe the “essence of the chalkboard” in only two sentences. One student philosophically opined:

“A chalkboard is a lot like memory: often jumbled, unorganized and sloppy. Even after it’s erased, there are traces of everything that’s been written on it.”

Read more here and let us know what you think: Is teaching to the tweet a blasphemy or revolutionary? Viva la tweet?

(Photo by Alton, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported)