Colleges tweet skills on art of Twittering

Forget writing’s five Ws of who, what, where, when and why. The new skill being taught in college communications classes is how many, as in how many characters do you have left in a 140-character space?

Twitter, the fast-growing microblogging service that has tripled in size over the past year to nearly 18 million users, is so ubiquitous that it is being taught in college classes. Many universities have incorporated Twitter skills as part of new-media and social-media courses; others have broken out Twitter into a course of its own.

At DePaul University in Chicago, students can take Digital Editing: From Breaking News to Tweets. The course is taught by Craig Kanalley, founder of Breakingtweets.com. Mr. Kanalley says when be started his site early this year, he met a lot of student journalists who were still caught in old-school, long-form newsthink. He envisioned teaching new writers to think short.

Mr. Kanalley says his course “combines traditional journalism with new technology.”

“You still need to know how to write,” he says.

The syllabus includes: sources (how to find them, how to confirm them), how to find breaking news, how to be a citizen journalist.

“My course is not so much on how to tweet on your personal account,” Mr. Kanalley says. “It is how to use it as an important skill. There is still a lot of writing involved.”

In the rapidly changing social-media landscape, thinking with an economy of words is going to aid people in a variety of professions, Mr. Kanalley says. Writing quickly, getting someone’s attention and communicating in short spurts are necessary for people planning careers in sales, marketing and teaching, for example.

At American University in the District, Twitter is not taught as its own course. However, Amy Eisman, director of writing programs and the Weekend Interactive Journalism Program, says, “We in the journalism division would be foolish if we didn’t incorporate some understanding of Twitter’s power, and foibles, into our classrooms.”

Ms. Eisman says there is room for the long and the very short in communication.

“The broader goal is to help citizens understand a complex society so that they can make more informed decisions based on accurate information,” Ms. Eisman said in an e-mail. “Sometimes that information comes through a well-crafted story. Sometimes it comes from a well-produced broadcast piece. Sometimes it comes from the crowd-sourced Twitter feed that links to audio elsewhere. No one single delivery is a substitute for the other.”

David Parry, assistant professor of emerging media at the University of Texas at Dallas, teaches Twitter as part of his introductory class on new media.

“I have heard jokes that it is ‘majoring in Facebook,’ but it is a lot more than that,” he says. I get students thinking ‘What can you say in 140 characters?’ It is hard to do, but it gets them realizing that content has value.”

More important than the economy of words is the value of conversation, Mr. Parry says. That is what really separates old media from new.

“We have to stop treating [writing] as a monologue and start looking at it as a conversation,” he says.

Story Continues →