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Tips for Twitter-phobes IS TWITTER TOO TRIVIAL for the business classroom? Absolutely not, says Mark Frydenberg, senior lecturer for computer information systems at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and co-author of the text- book Web 2.0 Concepts and Applications. "Too many professors still believe that people use Twitter to tell friends, 'I'm having a peanut butter sandwich for lunch,'" says Frydenberg. But today, mainstream media outlets use Twitter to collect viewer feedback and information about breaking stories; com- panies use it to provide customer care and test new products; and marketers use it to conduct promotions. "Students need to know how it's being used in busi- ness and how to use it themselves," he emphasizes. Twit- ter also can help professors achieve learning objec- tives in the classroom. Frydenberg gave a presentation titled "Twitter for Skeptics" at Cengage Learning's Course Tech- nology Conference last year. In his talk, he highlighted ways that pro- fessors can use Twitter as a mean- ingful tool in the business classroom: To share information. Have stu- dents send quick tweets to highlight blogs, articles, or Web sites of interest. Twitter has a feature called "Lists" that allows professors to create a group of their students and easily follow their tweets. To collect ideas. Professors can specify a "hash tag"—a word preceded by a pound sign—for their courses that students can add to their tweets to route their ideas to a single feed for the class to see. "The hash tag for my course is #CS299," Fryden- berg explains. "Last semester, I had a student who used Twitter to take notes. I asked him to add the hash tag so he could share his notes with the class. Other stu- dents often commented on his tweets, continuing the class discussion on Twitter." To refine ideas. Ask each student to compose a tweet that sums up an important concept in the lecture or assigned reading, and add the class hash tag. Then use an application such as TwitterFall.com or TwitterFountain.com to display their tweets onscreen in front of the class. "Tweeting forces students to think about what they want to say in just 140 characters," says Frydenberg. To find current information. Even if students don't tweet, they can use Twitter search (search.twitter.com) to see what people are saying about a current topic. People often will tweet links to recent blog posts, arti- cles, and videos that they just discovered. "Retweets" give an indication of a tweet's popularity. To invite questions. When Frydenberg invites a guest presenter, he uses www.ustream.tv to stream the lecture live online, and he and his students tweet the videostream URL to their followers. Students in class and viewers out- side the classroom can tweet questions to appear on an in-class screen, and speakers can answer in real time. To research companies. Advise students to use Twitter to search for information on companies. "If they want to work at Deloitte, they can fol- low two or three people who work there," says Frydenberg. "It's a low-barrier way to get a win- dow into that world." To build networks. Assign students to follow not just their friends on Twitter, but also ten or more people they don't know. A "follow and be followed" approach can help them expand their personal and pro- fessional networks. When he started using Twitter in the class- room, he required students to tweet three times a day for two weeks. "In the beginning, I learned a lot about when my students were showering or exercis- ing! But eventually, they began tweeting, 'I saw an inter- esting article or video, and here's the link.'" Frydenberg also keeps his personal and professional personae separate. "I follow my personal friends on Facebook, while most of my professional contacts are on LinkedIn and Twitter," he says. To build a fol- lowing, he shares his Twitter name at the end of each professional presentation he makes and lists his feed in online forums such as WeFollow.com, a Twitter direc- tory, under the education category. "The book Twitter for Dummies calls Twitter the new business card. It helps people find you," Frydenberg says. "If you say something interesting, people will follow you." Follow Mark Frydenberg on Twitter @checkmark. Tip: Don't feel obligated to read every tweet from those you follow. Apps like Filttr.com, TweetDeck.com, and BizEd May/June 2011 T4bp.com help filter out the noise and organize tweets by users or topics. —Mark Frydenberg 69