The Power of Pull

Reading through the post-semester reflections of my Composition I classes, I was surprised by the opinions on our blogging/tweeting project. This was my first semester integrating Twitter into a first-year writing class. My expectation was that students would prefer the microblogging platform over a traditional blog. However, while many enjoyed the Twitter experience, they recommended that I drop Twitter and keep traditional blogging as part of my future class curriculum. Twitter is seen as a time waster, a lesser version of Facebook, by many of my Fall 2011 students. I seen Twitter as the perfect vehicle for community building for the college student -- it's more formal than Facebook, yet not as professional as LinkedIn.

Community building is a key component of critical pedagogy and a marketable trait in today's economy (Wikinomics). Now the challenge is making social networking an actual tool to empower instead a tool to distract and prevent from action. I want it to attract opportunities and change for students in the "pull" fashion. The Power of Pull was eloquently sold to me at the New Media Consortium in 2010 by co-author John Seely Brown.

For our first assignment in my English 112 class, I want us to identify a personal goal and then position ourselves online to communicate with like-minded or cutting edge individuals. Originally, I had Twitter be a necessary component, but other methods could work as well, following and commenting on blogs, participating in forums, joining online communities, etc.