Blog about Twitter

Twitter as a communication tool sets it apart from other conventional and more traditional ways of communicating.

For example, Twitter is unique in the way users can communicate with each other. Given only 140 characters, the user needs to be concise and to the point, so they can't go into heavy detail. This is different than Blackboard, which has no character limit and you can basically respond for as long as you'd like (although that's probably not a good idea.)

Twitter's advantage is that it forces users to consider what exactly they're writing, and it allows other users to favorite, reply, or retweet it for more visibility. Furthermore, with the # functionality, it allows for a larger degree of organization and the ability to sort posts by tags, which you can't do in Blackboard discussions.

Also, the Twitter interface is very easy to access and use, and you can follow classmates as well, whereas Blackboard's discussion interface can be confusing to navigate and even harder to use properly.

Twitter compared to an in-class discussion is slightly more similar and both are easier to manage than Blackboard. For example, in an in-class discussion, students can respond directly to each other and have a conversation. We can do this in Twitter as well, and other users can chime in their thoughts just the same, the only difference being the platform the discussion is held.

I'd say that Twitter is more similar to an in-class discussion than it is with Blackboard, which is more of a traditional forum type of platform.