Blog About Twitter

A Twitter discussion, a BlackBoard discussion, and an in-class discussion all differ in the extent to how we are able to communicate with others. On Twitter, we must be as specific, concise, and to the point as possible to remain within the 280 character limit. The idea is to express thoughts with the fewest amount of words to get one’s point across to others. I prefer to have the ability to elaborate on my ideas in order to prevent any possible miscommunication or confusion over my posts. On Twitter, conversations between users can extend into extremely long message threads being created on one topic. Nonetheless, for viewing quick reactions and thoughts to trending news, pop culture, politics, sports, and other topics of interest, Twitter excels in this regard. Through the use of hashtags and being able to tag relevant individuals in these short tweets, Twitter allows us to showcase to followers and other fellow users our pictures and our instant thoughts, sometimes with links, about any topic at any given time.

On BlackBoard, there is no limit to the length of our posts. It is quite similar to a blog in that we are free to change the font and font size, add images and links, and even comment on posts put up by the professor and other students. However, BlackBoard posts are typically about topics relating to a certain course, and are normally not about reacting to the latest current events.

In-class discussions are the best way to communicate with one another. We are able to look at someone directly to address them and use different tones, inflections, and emphasis in our voices to really bring a discussion to life. Follow up questions can be asked immediately after one is finished talking, and other classmates and the professor can jump into a conversation more easily than on Twitter because it is socially more acceptable to talk amongst one another face-to-face than to interject into a Twitter conversation that is seemingly between two users. Finally, in-class discussions are more dynamic and typically cover a wide variety of topics in a single class meeting.