Austrailia’s Griffith University has added a Twitter component to an existing course which teaches basic news gathering and writing skills. Referring to the journalistic role of Twitter in matters like the recent Iranian protests, the school believes that up-and-coming journalists can benefit from training in the micro-blogging service to help them gather information and write stories. (It was originally reported that the course was only on Twitter, and mandatory.)
[via Switched]
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Twitter is yet another communication vehicle that is being used by millions for various reasons, is there a need for an entire course? Perhaps a one or two day seminar on how to use it would suffice. What about including brevity within an existing writing class?
October 24th, 2009 at 2:17 am
Correction please: Your claim is wrong. As the Senior Journalism academic involved with the course I must now correct a number of misunderstandings caused by your post and others. The real story is that an existing journalism course has added a component involving Twitter. The course teaches basic news gathering and writing skills and introduces students to journalism and politics. This year we have introduced an additional component that requires students to post Tweets that reflect on the processes involved in gathering and writing their news story assignments. One of the criticisms some make of journalism is its lack of self-reflexivity. What we are doing does NOT involve a mandatory course on Twitter – it’s errors like yours that cause undue criticism.
October 24th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
What an interesting policy, I think this shows that this medium is growing in unimaginable ways and that maybe there are some great opportunities wasting time tweeting.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Bold move by that school. I think it does make sense though, with Twitter growing the way it is for it’s purpose, it is very appealing to the “breaking” news/writing crowd.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Interesting correction – I would be hard pressed to build Twitter into a 13 week course. Our curriculum calls on Twitter and several elements that go into develop an online brand. Students of all strips are starting to learn the value of blogs, micro-blogging and bookmarking for a variety of person and business reasons. The trick is having a platform to practice and perfect the application of these tools in a learning environment. That’s what we did at http://www.whyhire.me
November 4th, 2009 at 10:16 pm