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The first Twitter class
DePaul University's College of Communications got national press attention this week when it announced plans to offer a college journalism course on Twitter, with the The Wall Street Journal reporting that the class is being touted as the first of its kind. DePaul's press release also made the claim of being first. But University of Washington communications professor Kathy Gill says not so fast.
Gill taught a spring course at the UW that largely focused on Twitter, and followed up this summer with another more detailed offering in the graduate school. That class was titled "Beyond The Fail Whale: How Twitter Is Changing Organizations."
"You could say qualifiers that ours was graduate and theirs (is) undergraduate, but there are no qualifiers needed for ours," Gill said. "Ours was just the first one, period."
Gill admits that there's a "little ego involved" in terms of getting recognition for the UW's Department of Communications.
She said that the true pioneer in this realm is Howard Rheingold, who used Twitter extensively in a Stanford Unviersity journalism course last year.
Gill's planning to release a book this November based on the summer course, an instructional manual of sorts on how organizations utilize Twitter.
In terms of great college rivalries. Could this spark the next great college rivalry between the Blue Demons and the Huskies? Probably not.
But it does show how deeply Twitter is penetrating even the halls of universities.
"Lots of faculty have integrated Twitter into existing classes -- not just journalism or communications ones," Gill said. "However, focusing a class on Twitter -- this is definitely a 2009 phenomena."
Asked why it was important to teach Twitter in the classroom, Gill said that it represents the power of the real-time Web.
"It is a form of communications that is here to stay," said Gill. "Just like we needed to teach people about email -- how to use it, how to use it well and how it is being used -- we need to be teaching our students how to use this new communications technology."
About John Cook
John Cook is co-founder and executive editor of TechFlash. He has been covering the technology beat for nearly a decade, writing about startups, entrepreneurs and venture capital, most recently serving as a reporter/blogger at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
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