Twitter & Discussion in the Virtual Classroom

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 43 seconds. Contains 346 words.

Prompt: How does a Twitter discussion compare to a BlackBoard Discussion? To an in-class discussion?

I enjoy sharing ideas and conversing with classmates in any format.

In brief, virtually anything is better than Blackboard. I’m sure I’m not the first person to be inconvenienced by Blackboard’s cluttered interface and the 889,000 results for the Google search “blackboard terrible” attests to that. Blackboard is a Web 1.0 content management system disguised as a virtual learning environment, and one of the most prominent examples of featuritis. On a long enough timeline, the entirety of b=Blackboard’s page will be a series of hotlinks and a cluster of buttons. Although our class, CIS 3810 pretty much utilizes Blackboard to the fullest, that level of immersion is unprecedented in my Baruch career. The learning curve to publish content on Blackboard is high for both the professors who have to orient the site, and for the students of varied technical backgrounds. Speaking from experience, the “save to draft” option leads to a bermuda triangle of menus to retrieve the draft.

Visually, the hierarchical displays and the thread commenting features are also disorienting. Twitter’s meticulously-engineered user interface is geared towards a smooth user experience on both mobile and desktop, which stands in stark contrast to the choppy Blackboard experience. Although one must learn how to use unique features such as the @ and # signs, Twitter is simple and easy to track, especially when replying to multiple accounts. Blackboard is the most overcomplicated way of digitally doing one of the most basic tasks: speaking.

Communication isn’t just stringing fancy words together. It’s about understand and being understood. Communication is conveyed by the pitch of a voice, the shifts in tone, the clip of the delivery,  and non-verbal body language cues – 140 characters doesn’t fully do that justice. I always prefer a discussion where one can make eye contact when speaking with a peer and can gauge how receptive or frustrated they are in response to your arguments.