My previous post about Instructional Design in 140 characters generated a lot of interest, so I thought I’d tell you about a project I set up in 2010 to explore the use of Twitter to provide daily “tiny facts”.
I created the Twitter account, @140university and in the first part of the project I provided daily tweets (in a number of different categories) which contained a fact PLUS a link to a resource to find out more. This allowed me to provide extended training/teaching content. Here are couple of tweets from 140 University:
Hemlock is a large, coarse, unpleasant-smelling plant. It is the poison hemlock that was used to put Socrates to death http://bit.ly/a3zydH
— 140 University (@140university) March 23, 2010
Genghis Khan died in 1227 after conquering much of the Persian Empire http://bit.ly/ddAz9v
— 140 University (@140university) March 16, 2010
Grace Hopper was one of the designers of the COBOL programing languagehttp://bit.ly/cGBrUa
— 140 University (@140university) March 11, 2010
I then introduced a quiz day on the Saturday of each week and explained in a tweet how it would work:
Saturday is quiz day. We tweet a question. You tweet your answer. Tomorrow we’ll give you the answer and tell you who got it right first — 140 University (@140university) April 24, 2010
On Saturdays I then tweeted a question, for example.
In the Ideal Gas Law PV=nRT.What do P, V and T stand for? — 140 University (@140university) April 24, 2010
On the Sunday I then tweeted the answer:
In the Ideal Gas Law PV=nRT.P=pressure of a gas, V=volume of a gas, and T=temperature of a gas. http://bit.ly/9EdkQ6 — 140 University (@140university) April 25, 2010
and also announced the winner
First to tweet the correct answer yesterday was @drmobs. Congratulations! — 140 University (@140university) April 25, 2010
After @140University’s summer vacation in 2010, I decided to use the quiz format every day, to encourage enquiry-based learning. For example:
What South American country is named after an Italian City? Answer tomorrow — 140 University (@140university) September 19, 2010
and then
Venezuala is named after the Italiian city, Venice http://bit.ly/9TlfO4
— 140 University (@140university) September 20, 2010
and of course the winner
@techvaibhav Congratulations! you were the first to tweet the correct answer yesterday
— 140 University (@140university) September 20, 2010
As for the practicalities of achieving all this, note that I scheduled the daily tweets for the week in advance (using Hootsuite at that time) although I did have to create the “winning tweet” every day
Note: I also set up a 140 University Facebook page which provided another channel for this project. Although I haven’t done any more on this project since the end of 2010, both the Twitter account and Facebook page are still active.
tinyTraining
I have written about this project and other educational/training uses of Twitter in different places, but with the new interest in this area, I have decided to collate all these resources for easy reference on my tinyTraining page, where you can find other “tiny training” activities, and also some guidance on how you might put all the elements together to create a more structured “tiny course”.
Love the “tiny” efforts
(w big results) – think some enterprising grad student could go through Donald Clark’s blog marathon covering 50 learning theorists and create at least a tweet a day from those 
http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.de/2012/03/blog-marathon-50-blogs-on-learning.html
That is really a great idea, thanks for sharing.
[...] My previous post about Instructional Design in 140 characters generated a lot of interest, so I thought I’d tell you about a project I set up in 2010 to explore the use of Twitter to provide … [...]
[...] My previous post about Instructional Design in 140 characters generated a lot of interest, so I thought I’d tell you about a project I set up in 2010 to explore the use of Twitter to provide … [...]
[...] My previous post about Instructional Design in 140 characters generated a lot of interest, so I thought I’d tell you about a project I set up in 2010 to explore the use of Twitter to provide … [...]