Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation. This problem is compounded by the recent budget cuts that have squeezed ever more students into each room.

Fortunately, educators (including myself) have found thatTwitter is an effective way to broaden participation in lecture. Additionally, the ubiquity of laptops and smartphones have made the integration of Twitter a virtually bureaucracy-free endeavor. This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture.

Increased Participation

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Classroom shyness is like a blackhole: Once silence takes over, it never lets go. In my own experience, in a class of hundreds, the fraction of students who speak up is small, and a still tinier fraction contribute regularly.

That’s why, Dr. Monica Rankin of the University of Texas at Dallas was pleasantly surprised when her experiment with Twitter began pulling more students into discussion. “It’s been really exciting because, in classes like this, you’ll have three people who talk about the discussion material, and so to actually have 30 or 40 people at the same time talking about it is really interesting,” said Megan Malone, Teaching Assistant to Dr. Monica Rankin’s United States history course, in the video below.

During lecture, students tweet comments or questions via laptop or cell phone, while the TA and Dr. Rankin respond to a real-time feed displayed prominently in front of the room. Students who manage to live off the grid for 50 minutes can still pass in hand-written notes for the TA to tweet after class.

Students in another Twitter-friendly classroom at Purdue University agree that digital communication helps overcome the shyness barrier. “It’s just an easy way to answer questions in class without embarrassing yourself and raising your hand in a big lecture hall,” said one student. Studies frequently discover that greater participation translates into better academic performance, motivation, and a likelihood of adopting different points of view, which is why it is so striking that Twitter can foster that type of communication.

A Community of Learners

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The dynamic of an intellectual ecosystem, where students dive deep into class readings and argue contentious issues outside of class, is difficult to create if discussion ends when class is over. Fortunately, Twitter has no time limit. In fact, Dr. Rankin’s colleague David Parry, Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas, found that Twitter chatter during class spilled over into the students’ free time.

“The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class,” Parry wrote. “Once students started Twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half.” As a result, classroom conversation became more productive as “people were more willing to talk, and [be] more respectful of others.”

Parry’s experience is in line with results of one of the first education studies of Twitter, which found that students do indeed carry on discussion outside of the classroom.

In part, students find themselves checking the feed after hours because the public trail of Twitter chatter doubles as an excellent study aid. As one student from Rankin’s class put it, “The significant terms that we’ve talked about in discussions, we’ll tweet that, and you can [go] back [to] that, and it’s a pretty good study aid.” This, in turn, keeps Twitter on their minds, fueling the cycle of involvement.

Conclusion

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For schools hit hard by the recession, Twitter is an inexpensive solution to the growing problem of increasing class sizes. It is a tried-and-true platform to let conversations flourish. Indeed, Dr. Parry declared that “it was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching.”

A new policy released today by the Pentagon has reversed multiple bans on social media websites and tools, effective immediately. This policy includes YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google Apps, and other social tools.

Certain branches of the military, such as the U.S. Marines, ban the use of social media because they are a “proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure.” Today’s decision, handed down by the Office of Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn, will reverse that ban and others, such as the one the U.S. Army has had on YouTube since 2007.

The new policy is far reaching, but as NYT’s At War Blog points out, it isn’t without caveats. The change only affects the military’s non-classified Internet network, known as NIPRNET. It also gives commanders at all levels leeway in temporarily banning specific social tools. In other words, you can expect some commanders to reinstate some of these bans for security reasons.

Regardless, we believe that today’s decision is a great step towards bringing families and friends closer to their loved ones overseas. More and more communication takes places over these channels — especiallyFacebook — and gives parents a chance to see what their son or daughter is up to and vice versa.

We look forward to learning more about the new policy in the coming months. If you are interested in reading the new policy, you can check out the PDF here

Ever wanted to Facebook friend someone you just met right on the spot? Until today, that wasn’t easy. But now, if you have an iPhone, all it takes is a single bump, courtesy of the Bump iPhone app.

For those of you unfamiliar with the app, Bump allows you to share contact information with friends simply by bumping your phone once with another friend’s phone (note: they much touch to work, you can’t just shake it in the air). The app then connects your iPhones and transfer contact information like phone numbers and addresses (for more, read our original review).

Now a new update to the app has brought it a couple of new features, but the one people will be talking about though is the Facebook integration. If you link your Facebook account to Bump and swap contact information with another person who has done the same, you can choose right then and there to initiate a friend request. Once done, a prompt will appear where the other party can accept or deny the friend request.

Jake Mintz, Co-Founder of Bump Technologies, told me that he and his team worked closely with Facebook to make this happen. He’s “pretty sure” that Bump’s the first app that can initiate and accept friend requests; we can’t think of any mobile apps off the top of our heads that do, so we think it’s likely Bump is the first.

Along with the Facebook integration, Bump now boasts custom profiles, which gives users more control over the contact information they share when “bumping” or create frequently-used share settings such as “work,” “personal,” or “fake” (just in case you can’t shake off that persistent and annoying guy/girl at the bar).

Jake says that this is the first of many social media integrations that will come to Bump. So yes, you can expect the ability to follow the people you meet via Twitter just by bumping iPhones in the near future.

Social Media: Party Like It’s 1999