Searching for research on Twitter

Look in your library's traditional periodical databases, in JSTOR, in Wilson Select, in LexisNexis, and you'll have a hard time finding articles written on current social web tools (aka Web 2.0), and you'll find nothing, at least at the time of this posting, published on Twitter. So, you take the same route all your students take and use Google, and there you find a site you can trust, according to all the criteria you have taught your students: The Chronicle of Education. And the journey begins.

In the Jan. 28, 2008, issue of The Chronicle of Education's online publication Wired Campus, the article "A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom" (http://tinyurl.com/yp7fhz) reported on the experience of David Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, in using Twitter in his college class.

Much of what Wired Campus discussed in the article came from Parry's own Jan. 23, 2008, blog entry in Academichack (http://tinyurl.com/25u2cx). Parry's blog, in turn, refers to reading about Twitter in a Wired article by Clive Thompson, published June 26, 2007(http://tinyurl.com/2np4um). At first it seems that the trail runs cold here because Thompson's article is a purely personal report on his own (noneducational) experience as a Twitter user (aka Twitterer, Twit, Tweeter) with no links to other articles. But go back to Parry's blog and scroll down and there you'll find the research trail picks up.

In the comments section, Chris Lott very modestly states that he's written "a bit" on Twitter in his blog Ruminate (http://www.chrislott.org/tag/twitter/). An understatement about a detailed, incredibly useful, discussion of the uses and misuses of Twitter.

Another commenter, Allen A. Lew, suggests viewing his blog entry "Twitter Tweets for Higher Education" in his blog Web 2.0 Teaching Tools (http://tinyurl.com/yvpwn6). A site worth going back to repeatedly (and subscribing to if you aren't already overloaded on rss feeds).

Further down in the comments posting, you find that this blog entry in AcademicHack has been linked to a blog entry in Creating Lifelong Learners called "Carnival of Education" http://tinyurl.com/yvpwn6, which turns out to be a list of links to sites on using the 'Net in the classroom.

And even further down there's a comment posted by Richard Byrne (no relation) on using Pownce in the classroom, a service similar to Twitter, and a link to an article he wrote in Free Technology for Teachers (http://tinyurl.com/ysfzzr). In that article he links to another one he wrote Dec. 12, 2007, on Twitter titled "Get Kids Writing" (http://tinyurl.com/4vuj48).

This is the way of research on the web....not from website to website, but from blog article to blog article....to blog article to blog article... Now I need to log off and "tweet" about what I found.