Twitter ultimately did prove more useful than otherwise. One of the greatest mechanisms it had to offer, among many, was the use of crowd sourcing ideas and many instances of ensuing discussions thereof. One of my favorite moments was as follows: seeing someone tweet a thought that you had yourself. It gave a sense of validity to these thoughts when you see that other people are having authentically having it themelves.
The convenience of microblogging with two classrooms worth of voices on the same topic proved to pool that much more thought and discussion. The fact that we were able to have it on a platform that brought our thoughts together gave a sense of ownership to our own academia.
If I were to voice my strongest criticism of it, it would be no fault of the mechanism itself of using twitter, as much as the the users – there could have been more activity. More activity would have lent to even more of a sense of autodidactism, establishing and nourishing ideas through our own labor.
In any case, I do have a laugh at the immense sense of irony in this: using one of the most colloquialistic social media platforms as a tool for improving the reading and writing.
I agree with your last line about the irony. I actually didn’t think about that. Yeah I noticed that although I had to scroll a bit to refresh all the new tweets, the tweets themselves weren’t anything amazing, just small observations to fulfill the quotas.