Academics on Twitter

Recently I was interviewed for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s article on academics who Twitter. Here’s my portion of the story:

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8. Scott McLeod,an associate professor at Iowa State University and director of the university’s Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education. Tweet: “College students are online more AND reading more?http://snipurl.com/eko4k“

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http://twitter.com/mcleod
Followers: 1,307. Posts: 1,190.

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Mr. McLeod argues that professors have been too slow to adopt Twitter. Academic discussions online often take place on closed e-mail lists, he says, when they should be happening in public forums like Twitter, so that a diverse group of outsiders can join in. “I think academics are actually missing a lot by not being involved in more of these social tools,” he told me. “There are a lot of academics who think, ‘If it’s not coming from some other academic it’s not worth a damn,’ and that’s not right.”

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He admits that some of the messages on Twitter are banal, such as people describing what they had for lunch that day, but he said such notes are part of what makes Twitter such a powerful way to feel connected to far-flung colleagues. “It’s like those daily interactions you have with your neighbor — sometimes they’re highbrow and sometimes they’re lowbrow, but after a while you really get to know the person.”

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I don’t know if academics have been too slow to adopt Twitter specifically, but I definitely believe that academics have been too slow to adopt social media generally.

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Check out the article if you’re interested. What do you think are some good ways that professors could be using Twitter?

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