I was reading a story over at Inside Higher Ed about the use of Twitter in the classroom and thought to myself, why don't educators use social media more to engage their students? Yes, there is this thing about younger saavy web users NOT embracing microblogging services like Twitter, but don't you think that if their teachers were leveraging these tools that they'd have to engage?
Of course.
On the other hand, you don't want to force students into smething they don't want to do because then it'll become a chore and eerily similar to "homework."
As I got to thinking about this more, I thought about my own college experience. Other than my relatively small journalism classes (small being 25-35 students), my classrooms were 70-125 kids deep. There's no way you can build a relationships with a professor with that many students in the class even if you sit in the front row and continuously ask questions. However, if the content being discussed in class was augmented with the tools I use to connect with friends and family, I might have paid more attention in those accounting classes and became an accountant vs a PR guy.