When students arrived in my class last year, they had to create a Twitter account and follow a list of 85 accounts that tweet about international news and current events. Almost everyday we started class by logging onto Twitter where each student would find an article (or two) to read about what's going on in the world. This paired really well with the course content--a project-based learning course covering major international events. For example, last year we covered events in Syria, Venezuela, Turkey, the South China Sea, Russia and the Philippines.
Frequently what students read on Twitter connected perfectly to the topics we covered in class. There was something really powerful about the fact that students were learning about events in the classroom while also keeping up with developments online in real time. For example, later in the school year, after studying the Syrian Civil War, students saw tweets and read articles about chemical attacks or the refugee crisis. So this style of learning reinforced the course content. It made the learning more tangible by helping students make connections between what we studied to what was going on in the real world.
This curriculum taught students the basics of a number of controversial international issues so that it was easy to keep up with them beyond the end of the course. Often a major obstacle to teenagers’ keeping up with current events is that they don't know where to start. News articles frequently don't tell the whole story, just the recent developments and students lack the background knowledge necessary to contextualize the piece. With Twitter in Contemporary World History we overcome this obstacle. Whenever I could afford it, I built extra time into our current events sessions to allow for questions and discussion. Students asked questions about current events that we didn't cover in class that appeared in their feed. More often than not, one of their fellow students had a read an article about it and could fill them in. If not, I would provide the backstory, or I would tell them to look it up. They then used the sources in our Twitter network for reliable, up-to-date information on the topic about which they were unsure.
Clearly I'm a fan of this course, and the most important benefit was using Twitter so that when my class ended, my students can keep using the Twitter network to learn about international events. A number of times this school year, my former students have come up to me and mentioned logging into their class Twitter to see what's going on in the world. One student said, "I check your Twitter when I wake up in the morning." Others have sought me out to talk about international events that they learned about online. I can't think of a better metric of success when it comes to lifelong learning. Students immersed themselves in a space where informed citizens and news outlets discussed the state of our world. And they continue to learn from that space beyond our time together.
It's essential for History Departments to train lifelong learners. My Contemporary World History class helped convince students that studying history requires a knowledge of current events and that it involves sustained study and the ability to make connections between past and present. And my colleagues who teach my students the next year reap the benefits when my students make current events connections in their U.S. History classes.
Finally, the structure of this course helped convince my students that they can and should use social media differently. They can use it to keep up with current events, to learn about controversies online, and to follow causes that they care about. I'm not naive; I know I didn't reach all of my students. Many went back to using Twitter for sharing memes and subtweeting friends. But just the fact that they've used a social media network to learn about something they care about (even if they had to this time), will help them do this again in the future. Teenagers are already using social media applications for hours a day. We need to inject that space with opportunities for “lifelong learning.” That’s how we fill that expression with meaning again in education.
