On Twitter, Academic Debates Fall Short

The Ed Techie, an education blogger, tried to have a debate with colleagues using Twitter, the micro-messaging service. The Ed Techie, also known as Martin Weller, a professor of educational technology at the Open University in Britain, tried to get people talking about “virality” as an educational tool. The idea of virality, as he defined it, was an idea that causes people to react because it neatly encapsulates a concept.

It didn’t work, he says. “Although the inputs I had were good (and thank you to those who contributed), it didn’t really take off. In short, my debate around virality didn’t go viral,” he says in a new blog post.

Reasons? The Ed Techie suggests four of them:

1. The idea of virality in education is kind of boring.

2. The timing was bad. He launched the debate on Friday, “which may not be the best day of the week” because people have mentally checked out for the weekend. Plus he didn’t catch many people in other time zones.

3. Twitter may be a bad place for a debate. It has severe length limits for comments, it has poor threading, and participation in it is limited to the people who follow the originator.

4. The Ed Techie himself may not have been enough of a draw. “It’s possible that … I don’t have sufficient cache to make it fly,” he writes.

He’s being pretty hard on himself. So, Wired Campus readers: Any thoughts on good tech tools for vigorous and productive online debates? —Josh Fischman