TwEETI
TwEETI
Twitter for Engineering Education Transformation and Innovation
An Activity of the Alliance for Promoting Innovation in Engineering Education (aPIE2)
@apie2
Download: A printable pdf file of this page here.
Background: Repeated calls for the transformation of engineering education have resulted in a good deal of funding, effort, and reform, but the vision of an engineering education aligned with the imperatives of the 21st century remains, to a large extent, unfulfilled. A part of the difficulty is that individual institutions view their initiatives in education transformation as proprietary and a part of their competitive advantage. As a result, the sharing and exchange of innovations is slow, partial, or non-existent. Each institution is forced to reinvent the educational transformation wheel with, at best, passive assistance from the literature of engineering education, a literature that is static, not publicly discussed, and in which key innovations propagated at the same speed as less impactful results.
Opportunity. The rise of social media in blogs, social networking, and services such as Twitter provides a set of tools that permits innovations to be shared and discussed online actively, quickly, and in a manner in which trusted individuals can help separate the interesting from the routine. Unfortunately, the small number of individuals in engineering education who regularly blog or twitter about the subject limits the diffusion of useful innovations from school to school or around the world.
Vision. The vision of the Twitter for Engineering Education Transformation and Innovation (TwEETI) initiative is that tens or hundreds of engineering educators and friends of engineering education will (1) start to twitter about subjects related to engineering education transformation and innovation and (2) follow each other. By sharing or vetting the latest innovations in engineering education the existing literature will come alive and be put to better use. By fostering a culture of openness and sharing, it is also hoped the initiative will encourage institutions to view their innovations as most successful when they are implemented or partially implemented by other institutions.
Getting started. Twittering for engineering education is easy:
- Go to www.twitter.com and sign up for a free twitter account as an individual or for your organizational entity (department, school, college, center, initiative, etc.).
- Sign up for a button that permits you to easily post a URL to your twitter account (sharethis.com, addthis.com, or bit.ly). These buttons typically allow you to post a shortened URL to your twitter page to make it easy to share interesting results with others within the 140 character limit.
- Start twittering about engineering ed. Retweet (RT) interesting tweets to those who follow you.
- Follow the Alliance for Promoting Innovation in Engineering Education @apie2 (www.twitter.com/apie2).
- Follow those twitter accounts that @apie2 follows. All those who follow apie2 will themselves be followed as long as those accounts twitter on subjects related to engineering education.
If you have questions on these steps, Dave Goldberg at the University of Illinois (deg@illinois.edu) can answer your questions. Follow Dave @deg511.
About aPIE2. The Alliance for Promoting Innovation in Engineering Education is a grassroots organization of individuals and organizations interested in furthering the transformation of engineering education. For more information about aPIE2 and TwEETI go to the website www.apie2.org.
Themocracy
[...] TwEETI [...]
[...] @ifoundry, @deg511, @markatolin and @apie2 are live twittering at the 2009 IEEE Frontiers in Education conference in San Antonio. Twitter for Engineering Education Transformation and Innovation (TwEETI) instruction sheet is available here or on the http://www.apie2.org website (here). [...]
[...] To twitter for engineering education (TwEETI) sign up for twitter, follow @apie2, and follow those following @apie2. More detailed instructions are available here. [...]