twitter role play

Teaching with Twitter: how the social network can contribute to learning  was written by Rosie Miles, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom.  I read over a few different articles on how twitter can be used in education, but this one stuck with me.  Miles spoke of how she used a system similar to twitter to have her students delve deeper into the material they were assigned to read.  She had her students become a character from the novel and argue online with each other in this way.  It made me wonder, how can this be translated to history and actually be used on twitter?

The twitter problem seems self explanatory- protect the tweets.  The system Miles used was like twitter (limited to 140 characters and even using #hashtags) but it was not accessible to people outside of the classroom.  Miles felt that this would give students more of a sense of security to be more open.  However, just protecting your profile on twitter would solve this problem.  Then you could use the site but people would need to be approved before the tweets could be seen.

I think that using twitter as a sort of role playing scenario could be beneficial for understanding the impact of primary source documents on the people during the time they were written.  For example, if in an American history class that is studying the Revolutionary War, it could be interesting to see the effect of the Declaration of Independence.  Some students could be select founding fathers or the King, some could be loyalists or patriots, Northerners or Southerners.  In this way, rather than just reading about the obvious ways this document changed the lives of the colonists, students would have to understand how it would effect different groups and say why they are for or against it.

Obviously this doesn't need to be done in an online setting.  Similar things can, and have, been done in person in the classroom.  One of my favorite classes as an undergrad was studying Early Modern England, and we actually split up into the different factions involved in the Civil Wars of the mid-1600s and fought it out in class (with words, sadly. Though I was in the "war" faction and we all made swords to intimidate the "peace" and "royal" groups).  Miles stated, and I tend to agree, that sometimes dramatizing things like this in class can get silly and embarrassing.  My Early Modern British history class was an upper level and so we all got pretty involved as we were all declared history majors.  However, I had the same professor for a lower level European history class and sometimes when we tried to do similar things there,  certain students who weren't in the history program wouldn't get involved because they were a science or business major (I have to admit I am guilty of the opposite: I was very against certain science activities when I had to take those classes).  Not having to let peers see how excited you get in person can go a long way in letting certain students get out of their shell, and the internet can provide that screen.