Twitter. How would that work?

I used to have a personal twitter account, but the only thing I ever did on it was follow Lance Armstrong while he was participating in the Tour de France. That guy has really embraced modern technology tools and used twitter to update his fans about how he was feeling after another grueling day on the bike. It was extremely interesting to see when he had good days and bad ones, when he missed his family, when he had to report to yet another doping test, when he felt let down by his team mates. But he was at his best when he would throw in the occasional reminder that life was short, and that some people go through tremendous suffering every day. Live strong. Here twitter added to my life, and raised awareness (and money) for a good cause. But there are really no other people I wanted to tweet with. Not many people are that interesting it seems. The people that are interesting to me (friends and family) deserve more than 140 characters. I am definitely not the tweeting type.

I tried again for this exercise. I can see the value of Twitter as a way to send out announcements and reminders, but do we really need another mode to keep students on track? I am currently teaching a blended portion of a class. I see the students for the first official face-2-face class this Tuesday, but they had an online assignment due at midnight Friday. I emailed the students multiple times, even went to the class itself to introduce myself and to remind them that it would be a good idea to at least log in to the moodle site a few days before the first assignment was due since tech support on a Friday night is hard to find. Even my smiling face didn't prevent at least 2 students from emailing me in a panic just prior to the due time. Seems to me that there are always a few students that are not paying attention – I gave them every opportunity – still they did not take the opportunity that was given to them to succeed. Is Twitter just going to cause confusion, give me more work (reading all the chatter, making sure everyone has an account), or is it going to wake up those last 2 students who otherwise could not bother following the directions? Encouraging students to use Twitter to voluntarily share links and info they come across with each other might be an idea, but wouldn't that be better as a water-cooler forum on the course website?

So basically, I am not convinced that twitter will add much to the class. Am I too skeptical, too old-fashioned?

My twitter account: MAlleyne10