Collaborating across international boundaries: using twitter as a tool in the classroom

A problem in education today is being able to reach out to the students in innovative ways. While making it relevant and important for the students, we used twitter as a tool for student collaboration. A class in the USA and a class in Australia used twitter as a tool to collaborate within their courses as well as with each other for one semester. While this study did not find twitter to be the ideal tool for social education, it has opened up a new way to collaborate across boundaries. Humans are social beings and as educators, we can use the success of social web technologies to help educate the world.