Public Schools Become Twits (School Technology, Part 1)
Last night, my dad told me that the public school he works for has started using Twitter. Today when checking out the school’s website, I found their link to their Twitter page and took a glance. Nothing offense or interesting, but further, nothing that makes it seem like Twitter is a good fit for the school. Here is why public schools should NOT use Twitter.
1. Twitter is a private company. That means that Twitter owns all your data; you are NOT in control of it. If they want to start posting ads with your twits, they can. If they want to disable your account at any time, for any reason, they can. If they go out of business, they have no obligation to inform you so that you can make adjustments as needed.
Worst case scenario: my dad mentioned that his school had recently done a ‘youth risk’ survey of some sort. Some of the findings were surprising and he thought that they might be effectively communicated via Twitter. Credit to him for thinking outside the box. Let’s say he writes, “did you know that 1/3 of our high school students report that, in the last month, they have been in a car driven by someone who had had at least one alcoholic beverage?” And then Twitter, once Twitter figures out how to make money (no bets that they ever will, but this is worst case scenario thinking here), puts an ad up with the twit that’s based on keyword matching. So now you have a startling statistic about intoxicated driving paired with an ad for Miller Lite. Is that the message that public schools want to risk sending?
2. Twitter’s utility is limited. No doubt, public schools have a large stake in selling their brand. They need community buy-in to encourage support for potential referenda, et cetera. Thus, having a way to get information out over the internet is important. But why limit yourself to 140 characters? And why limit yourself to just one site? If you have something to say, then say it, but say it on a forum where it’s possible to spread more information than what a tiny text box will allow.
I’m all in favor of schools starting blogs. It’s a format they can control (with software installed on their own servers and managed by their own admins) with the possibilities for real information sharing. Want to post the text of an article rather than just a link? You can do it on a blog, but not on Twitter. Want to share a variety of resources with parents all collected on one post? You can do it on a blog, but not on Twitter. Want to email out a link to a specific post? You can do it on a blog, but not on Twitter. Want to have a variety of people post information with their own unique usernames (i.e. a multi-user blog), or have different tags for posts so that like information can be grouped together, or have a comments area where registered users can post their own thoughts? You can only do these things in a blog, not on Twitter.
3. Twitter’s longevity is far from guaranteed. Ask anyone who knows anything about technology – is Twitter a fad? You’ll get a resounding ‘yes.’ That doesn’t mean that Twitter can’t last, but currently, they have no way of making money. And with recent studies showing that over 60% of Twitter users don’t return during their second month of membership, it seems likely that Twitter will NEVER find a way to make money, at least not in a way that will work with local public schools.
Think about popular sites from the past – GeoCities, Friendster, Yahoo Chat. These sites, and many more, were all purported to be the future of the internet. And they were all popular for a time. But they haven’t lasted. GeoCities is gone, Friendster is nothing compared to Facebook, and online chat is considered quite passé. Even MySpace, once considered the future of music on the web and held as a standard up to which few predicted Facebook could surpass, is declining in popularity.
This phenomenon of waxing and waning web technologies is so common that the Onion recently featured a short story with the headline, “Classmates.com Employees Don’t Have Heart To Tell CEO About Facebook”. Classmates.com still advertises on the web, but its pay-for-access model cannot compete against an ad-supported site like Facebook. Twitter may be just another passing web fad, so for schools to start buying in seems quite immature, especially when other technologies (like blogs) can offer the same services with greater benefits. Furthermore, you want a format that can reach the most people. Twitter is strange and unfamiliar. A blog, on the other hand, can be made to look just like a part of your existing website.
I’ll write more on how schools can make blogs work for them tomorrow.
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