I have to say that although I don’t mind
“tweeting” I don’t particularly relish it either. It can seem a rather solitary venture,
sending out some brutally condensed message into the ether……unless, as luck
would have it, there happens to be someone else responding in real time and
then the act is almost like taking drugs or gambling, except that the pay back
is in the connection with a human being.
Which I suppose is what social media is really about, connecting with
people through discourse from wherever you happen to be at the time. People are after all highly social animals.
I was, therefore intrigued to find that the
temporal feature of Twitter has been harnessed to educate students of history
in an ingenious way. When I was a high
school history teacher we were very interested in the primary document, the
real material of life and how the role of the historian can be compared with
that of the detective weighing the evidence and drawing conclusions. I was even involved in a “living history”
project where students took on the trappings of a particular time period and
scenario to explore history from the inside.
The results were dramatic. A week
without electricity in a moorland cottage making your own candles and milking
cows has much to teach and in addition there is a great deal of research
necessary ahead of time to prepare the participants for what events were likely
to unfold. The realities of education,
however, dictated that this was an unsustainable model, only possible in rather
special circumstances and with very small groups. The onset of the National Curriculum put paid
to most of these kinds of ventures.
Welcome Twitter. Unlike conventional methods of discourse at a
distance and even in contrast to e mail or facebook, Twitter comes very close
to conversation when it happens in cohort with fellow Tweeters. Time is significant. Tweets are short and ephemeral and their work
is done efficiently. Enter
re-enactment. Students become real
characters in historical role and their actions, thoughts, emotions, and
motivations are played out as Tweets.
Because it is happening within the framework of time it takes on a sense
of immediacy and has the potential to make the tweeter internalize the past. In “Retweeting History Brings Those
Stories to Life” [1]Sara
Bernard describes an ingenious tool called TwHistory.
TwHistory allows students to experience
historical events in real time. You can
either follow an historical enactment that is being broadcast via Twitter or
you can design your own by thoroughly researching an event and meticulously
plotting tweets to allow it to unfold over time. Enactors have experienced the Cuban missile
crisis, pioneering in the American West, the Battle of Gettysburg, the sinking
of the Titanic, and Freedom riders, to name a few. Not only is it ingenious, but it is also free
through a creative commons liscence.
Tom Caswell goes
into more detail about Twhistory in "A Twist on Social Media and
History Education"[2]
where he describes how students first choose a character, then
research, evaluate and discuss the historical evidence. The next step is
to write tweets and schedule them to be sent at a specific time. The
tweets will reflect the perspective of the chosen character and so unveil the
human experience of a historic event to the student. Twitter messages are scheduled to reflect the
real time that events occurred on a particular day, adding a further layer to
the experience.
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