On the Net 3: Teaching with Mastodon

Students are never going to stop using their phones in class. Any attempt by professors to ban technology will backfire, and cause them to hate you and not learn anything. It'll be much better for class morale, participation, and retention of course material to give them a way to engage with the class using their technology.

I had an idea a while back for Livetweeted Lectures: students tweet the course material and their responses to it, with a predetermined hashtag so the professor can collect the tweets and grade them for participation points. But given that I've gotten a bit sour on Twitter lately, and given that even tweets with very carefully chosen hashtags can get lost in the ocean of information that is the birdosphere, I propose that courses implementing Livetweeted Lectures use Mastodon instead.

A department can create its own purpose-built Mastodon instance. Something like, to use a nearby example, uw.linguistics.space. Professors make accounts with names that clearly identify them as professors, such as ProfKatz@uw.linguistics.space, and students are expected to use either their name or their student ID as their handle (AlexKatz@ etc or amk19@ etc).

Each session of a class has its own hashtag (like #ling101week1), which students use to livetoot the class. Professors grade students' posts for participation points as they see fit, and have moderator privileges both to remove posts that share test answers and punish their authors according to the department's plagiarism policy. Students can assemble study guides from the hashtag search results, or the professor can compile an official study guide based on what students actually learned, not just what they were supposed to learn.

Livetweeting has become an important part of academic discourse, so much so that following a conference hashtag is often the best way to keep up with what's happening at a conference, even if you're physically there. It's an important skill for university students to develop, and using Mastodon will give them a practice space that's safer than Twitter and will help them pay attention in class.