There’s no doubt that presidential candidate Barack Obama did more to advance politicians’ use of social media than any other candidate in the 2008 election. Obama built on Howard Dean’s revolutionary 2004 campaign, which took advantage of social media to build a following, organize activists, and ultimately connect with potential voters. Scholars across academic boundaries are uniting around the banner of social media with the hope that they will be able to connect with their students on the level that politicians like Barack Obama were able to connect with potential voters. President Obama’s huge success with the youth vote in the 2008 elections suggests that following his example might teach us a thing or two about connecting with our students.
Teachers of writing and composition have particularly interesting things to learn from this shift toward the digital. Andrea Lunsford recently did a study of the writing habits of young people. She found that young people write more than ever, and that a striking percentage of that writing happens online. As teachers of writing, we have a choice to make. We can instruct students solely based on the traditional page, or we can teach writing where our students are actually writing: online. We can help our students do high-quality writing and research in the digital sphere, making them better writers where they write in their personal and professional lives as well as their educational lives. Just as President Obama has taken advantage of Twitter as a medium to create connections between followers and a cause, teachers can use Twitter to create connections between students and a subject.
While Internet newcomer Twitter has been embraced as a breakthrough in social media and mass communication, and Facebook has revolutionized the way millions of users experience the Internet, neither has been studied as an example of a medium for successful rhetorical argumentation. Scholars are becoming more interested in “microblogging” as a medium, but have yet to analyze the pedagogical implications in these capsules of prose. In this presentation, I will first briefly introduce Twitter as a writer’s medium, after which I will discuss three types of rhetorical identification that Twitter allows students to create: with the teacher, with peers in the class, and with experts in their field. I will also suggest possible pedagogical applications related to each type of identification, built specifically to forge these relationships.
The accompanying “Prezi” presentation can be found here.
