One of the challenges of using Twitter within a course is getting students to follow one another. Even worse, what students would want their peers to see that they were following their professors? Everyone in the course can use a #hashtag, but Twitter has provided a new method that will make academic communication much easier.
Users who go to the https://twitter.com site are now offered the opportunity to create Lists. Lists allow one to pick users to put in a specific category so that tweets from those users can be viewed on a separately accessible page. For example, https://twitter.com/eronel/duke shows all the “tweeps” that I’ve identified as originating from Duke. One of the best characteristics of these new Lists is that you don’t have to follow the people in your Lists. That means you could have a list of all the students’ accounts in a list without having to follow each one and then they could subscribe to that list and be able to access their classmates’ tweets in the same way. Similarly, you can create lists of experts in your discipline and your students can subscribe to their wisdom in the same way.
