Georgia Military College

Twitter, primarily a social media outlet, has recently started foraying and gaining a foothold in higher education. Written from a student perspective, this paper attempts to explain and critically discuss the usage and popularity of Twitter as a tool of active learning in higher education. The author writes about her student experience of using Twitter in her Public Relations Communications graduate class. The paper explores and scrutinizes the social media channel within the theoretical framework of connectivism. Twitter appeared on the contemporary education scene in late October 2006. Originally developed as a social messaging microblogging tool, Twitter found its way into higher education institutions (Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008). At present, a growing number of higher educational institutions all over the world are teaching courses through this microblogging social media application. Twitter is a microblogging tool which allows users to send brief but informative messages to each other in fewer than 140 characters (Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008). The messages are called tweets, the people who tweet are called twitterers, and the people who read these tweets and respond to them are called users. It allows for real-time communication, diverse interaction, discussion with collaboration, and sharing of experiences and opinions (Skiba, 2008). Twitter has become a popular teaching tool that provides for active learning, learner attention, learner discovery, learner participation, and learner knowledge schema development. Written from a graduate student’s viewpoint, this paper examines and discusses the usage of the educational technological tool of Twitter in the classroom. The author writes in depth about her experience and observation of using Twitter in her graduate Public Relations class at an international university in south-east USA. She explains the role and usage of Twitter using the contemporary online learning theory of connectivism. The paper is divided into three sections. Section One provides a brief explanation of connectivism theory, followed by the author’s story in Section Two. The third and final section of the paper embodies the discussion where the connectivism theory is revisited in greater depth. Through her paper, the author hopes to generate relevant and meaningful debate about using Twitter as a method of student engagement in graduate classrooms.

In his letter to Walter Hines Page dated 22 March 1899, Charles W. Chesnutt expressed dismay at the steady erosion of blacks' civil rights in turn-of-the-century America. Referring specifically to North Carolina's adoption of the grandfather clause that had been used to disenfranchise black male residents of several southern states, a the Supreme Court upheld in Williams v. Mississippi (1898), Chesnutt worried about the growing hostilities confronting black Americans. In language that displays mistrust of the jurisprudential wisdom of the nation's highest court, Chesnutt finds its to be but one more abuse of blacks: the Supreme Court of the United States is a dangerous place for a colored man to seek justice. He may go there with rights; he is apt to away with none at and with adverse shutting out even the hope of any future protection there; for the doctrine of stare decisis [the legal doctrine stipulating adherence to precedence] is as strongly intrenched [sic] there as the hopeless superiority of the Anglo-Saxon is in the Southern States. (To Be Author 121) As this passage makes clear, by the late 1890s, and especially following Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Chesnutt, like many African Americans, found the Supreme Court tacitly sympathetic to racist southern legislation. Beginning with the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873 and continuing up through Williams v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court proved unwilling to overturn state laws that, it argued, only made possible the infringement of constitutional rights but did not target any particular group to suffer discrimination (Sundquist 237, 421). By deferring to states' rights throughout post-Reconstruction, the Supreme Court in effect allowed the persistent and deliberate hollowing out of black civil rights gained in the Reconstruction amendments. For Chesnutt, the fact that the Supreme Court had upheld Mississippi's outrageously unjust and unconstitutional law travestied the promise of Emancipation and revealed the Court to be a place of disheartening mystification (To Be Author 121). That a black person, in seeking from the Supreme Court redress for maimed fights, might come away with none at all, demonstrated the Court's role in restoring the political and social conditions of a quasi-slavery (emphasis added). As Eric J. Sundquist describes, blacks faced a return to a second slavery without the Court's protection of their constitutional rights (228). Moreover, as Chesnutt's comment underscores, because of stare decisis, an adverse decision by the Supreme Court effectively [shut] out even the hope of any future protection, thus threatening not just to recuperate white oppression of blacks but to make it a permanent feature of Jim Crow America. The prospect of permanent confinement to a second-class status made post-Reconstruction America the nadir moment for blacks. (1) Lacking legal protection of their recently won civil rights, African Americans confronted the specter of the antebellum South. In the same year that Chesnutt wrote to Page, he published The Conjure Woman (1899), a collection of thematically related stories that depicted the conditions of slave life on several neighboring North Carolina plantations. Hoping to counter the plantation nostalgia popularized by writers such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, Chesnutt appropriated the local color dialect story to feature the oppressive brutality of the Old South's peculiar institution. Through their representation of slavery's dehumanization of blacks, the stories deromanticize the bygone southern idyll and haunt the post-Reconstruction South with its repressed history. Chesnutt's representation of conjure as a black folk-belief system involving the supernatural and giving agency to black resistance has generated analyses of The Conjure Woman as gothic fiction. …

ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVLetterNEXTOn Concepts of Partial Volume and Law of Partial VolumeDavid W. Miller View Author Information Georgia Military College, Martinez, GA 30907Cite this: J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, 12, 1594Publication Date (Web):December 1, 2001Publication History Received3 August 2009Published online1 December 2001Published inissue 1 December 2001https://doi.org/10.1021/ed078p1594.1RIGHTS & PERMISSIONSArticle Views250Altmetric-Citations-LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (56 KB) Get e-Alerts Get e-Alerts