The Assignment In a Nutshell
1) Create an account with Twitter by Jan. 19, 2016. Find me http://twitter.com/dancingdivala, follow me, and  post your user name to the class blog. Follow all students registered in this class.
2) Post a minimum of 2 “tweets” a week. The goal is for you to be reading at least 1-2 articles a day and tweeting consistently, but I realize some weeks may be more engaging than others. To that end the minimum for the semester is 30 (though you’re welcome and encouraged to send more), and I won’t count more than 10 a week in the last two weeks of class. Be consistent; don’t procrastinate.  To be counted, class tweets must include a link to a relevant article, a short summary explaining how it relates to why others might want to read it for this class, and our course hashtag #uk401. Once you get going, you may find yourself tweeting more easily and often than you expect.

3) Find and follow at least one person or organization not in our class who regularly tweets about issues related to class.  You can do a search on Twitter to find tweets related to the topoi, or you can look at trending topics when events are in the news. You can look up a list of hashtags to find streams that will be of interest to you. Additionally, you might read more about what hashtags are and why they’re important. You can also look at who a particular person follows and decide to follow them too. (I follow a lot of different folks who Tweet about Israel/Palestine–feel free to use my Twitter account as a branching out point, but by no means feel limited to it).

4) For extra credit, you’re invited to write a short 1-2 page reflection essay discussing what you learned from this exercise: what did Tweeting help you learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict(s), the people who care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (s), your classmates, this course, and the medium of Twitter itself? This essay like the tweets themselves, will be evaluated based on your effort–if you do your best to write a thoughtful, sophisticated reflection, you’ll earn full credit. If you choose to write this optional essay, you must turn it in before the last day of class on April 28. It is one of the few things I’ll ask you to print out and turn in as hard copy.

Why This Twitter Assignment?
Some of you may have heard of Twitter, a “micro-blogging” platform,” and some of you might already use it. If you haven’t, you’ll soon learn that people all around the world are writing to connect to one another, to spread ideas, and to enable their words to make an impact.

Some of you might be wondering, “What is a micro-blog?” and “Why do I have to keep one for this class.”   It’s “micro” because it is one that you write in 140 characters or less. Many of you probably already write “tweet-like” updates to your status if you keep a Facebook account, so you might have some familiarity with the genre. For this assignment you’ll be writing regular “tweets,” (the 140 character messages you compose, send, and follow in response to Twitter’s basic writing prompt: “What are you doing?”) with a slightly more refined audience and purpose. While the countless people who use the platform answer that question in myriad ways, for this class I’m asking you to use it to do several things.

1) Read more news than you otherwise might.
One of the main learning objectives for this class is to help you understand the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Technologies are changing and evolving all the time, and so are our relationships to them. It’s my hope that using Twitter to follow the news  and each other will help you in this task.

Your job for the semester is to read the news voraciously from a variety of sources and track and analyze related issues and controversies as they pop up. You’re required to post a minimum average of 2 tweets a week, with links to relevant news items that employ at least one of the topics we discussed in class and our course hashtag #uk401. It’s really important that you use this hasthag, otherwise I won’t see them and you won’t receive credit for them.

To help you reach your goal, you’ll notice two columns on the right side of our class website. On the far right, you’ll notice the “tweetstream” for people in our class. Every time you tweet using #uk401, the tweets will appear in real time on our site. In the middle column, you’ll see the log-in prompt for this site and below, you’ll see the blogroll which includes links to a variety of news sources about new media, technology, and literacy to get you started. (If you find another source you’d like to share with the class, please email me and I’ll add it to the blogroll for us). The blogroll should help you get started finding things, and you may choose to follow news sites as well.

2) Improve your analysis and summarization skills.
Since tweets are limited to 140 characters, you’ll need to really think about how to compose them–every character counts.  For class, your tweets must include a link to a relevant article, a summary/analysis of that article, and the course hashtag#uk401–that’s a lot to squeeze into such a short space.

For some tips on how to maximize your prose, you might find Nielsen’s “tweet optimization” instructions helpful. What I really like about this site is how it details the revision process. We’ll be learning about revisions for longer assignments, but here it shows you that even in writing something as short as a tweet you have to think about your audience and rhetorical purpose, which brings me to our next goal and as well as a tip/caveat.

3) Sharpen your understanding of rhetorical audience/purpose while also increasing collaboration and community.
Part of what is so unique about Twitter is its “publicness,” and the many different ways people answer the question “What are you doing?” Obviously, this publicness is something to keep in mind when writing your tweets for class. Since we will all be following each other, you’ll see my tweets, your tweets, and everyone else’s tweets on a regular basis. Remember that we’re all part of your immediate audience, so post with that in mind. While you’re welcome to tweet about non-course specific things, remember your audience includes classmates and others. You might moderate some of what you would otherwise post on Twitter, simply because you know I’ll be reading it. My guess is that through our tweets we will both compose and revise our understandings of one another and the class a little bit differently than if we weren’t tweeting.

Also, because Twitter is public and you’ll be posting about controversial things, you may get retweeted (RT) or receive responses from others who you do not know and with whom you disagree. This is part of the exercise. I hope it will help underscore the fact that writing matters while also helping you learn how to negotiate these tensions/differences through your prose. You may introduce each other to people to follow, and hopefully your knowledge of the class topics will be enriched by following or interacting with someone from outside of class.

Our class tweets will be archived, and I hope they will constitute a library from which you may draw sources to respond to in your blog posts and to include or refer to in your final essays. In this regard, I hope the tweetstream will serve as a collective harvest that will help you in other course writing goals.

Optional Things to Do With Twitter

1) Some of you are probably have probably already figured out the math that 2 tweets a week from 20 other people adds up to a lot of tweets in your stream. There are a number of applications available to help manage this information.  I  use Tweetdeck on my computer and Twitterific on my iphone. There are a number of free applications for your computer and your phone. I encourage you to experiment, and share your experiences here on the blog or in class.

2) You might consider linking your Twitter account and Facebook status by using a  Facebook Twitter application. You may want to selectively update one or the other, by using the selective twitter application.

3) You can share pictures taken with your cellphone by using Twitpic or Instagram or a variety of other appliations.

4) You might think about and experiment with how Twitter can help you, an organization with which you’re involved, or a local cause to accomplish its rhetorical goals. I encourage you to brainstorm and then experiment.

5) Once you establish a Twitter account, it will prompt you to fill out the profile. While I won’t require that you do this part, I do strongly encourage it. Consider it an act of digital ethos construction. Sometimes the profile information is all you’ll have about an individual (or a bot posturing as an individual), and you’ll use it and whatever you might find by googling the “person” to determine whether or not he/she is a credible source. You will help others learn about your credibility by filling this out. You may also elect to create a Twitter account specifically for this course.

6) If you tinker with something else you’d like to encourage others to try, let me know and I’ll add it here.