Universities Build Twitter Communities 140 Characters at a Time

Part digital flier board, part alumni engagement tool and part technological experiment, a growing number of universities are turning to Twitter as a way to connect with students, faculty, staff and friends of the school.

Twitter, the social networking site that has everyone from celebrities to the Catholic Church raving about the power of instant communication encapsulated in 140 characters or less, is catching on among university administrators even as some students remain skeptical of the new medium.

@higheredu, a Twitter profile that follows only colleges and universities, lists more than 1,300 profiles used by schools around the world.

Though administrators are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, many students still feel more comfortable on Facebook, seeing Twitter as a site for only tech-savvy students.

Universities that use the site post press releases, event information, emergency notifications and everything in between. As commencement ceremonies roll around, some universities are using the site as an opportunity to test the engagement of the network of students who use the site.

At Washington University in St. Louis (@wustl), the official Twitter account organized by the school's public affairs office is being used to advertise the school's live webcast of commencement ceremonies and to give grads an opportunity to have their pictures find a larger audience. A post on Thursday morning read "Going to Commencement? Tag your tweets & pics #WUSTL09 and we'll RT [re-tweet, i.e. highlight] the best of the day."

Washington University also has several accounts for individual schools and departments including the Career Center, School of Engineering and Student Union.

Arizona State University (@asu) created an account devoted to Commencement proceedings (@asugraduation) and live tweeted President Obama's speech there. The feed included a recap of poignant lines from Obama's speech and a narration of the ceremony from beginning to end. "Ceremony over! Tassels moved, caps thrown, and fireworks! Ka-boom. Congrats to all our grads. G'night! #asugrad09," read the final tweet of the day.

Like most of the tweets on the site, University posts eschew the conventions of standard written English in favor of abbreviations, acronyms and the compressed syntax necessary to convey meaning in 140 characters. Though Twitter has developed its own internal grammatical logic, seeing such flexible application of language from usually stoic institutions of higher education is a bit jarring.

Beyond Twitter's application for basic public relations, bloggers across the internet have written about the use of Twitter in classroom settings. Though there is no indication that lecture notes will be sent out tweet by tweet anytime soon, some professors have used the site as a way to compliment classroom discussions.

"Once students started twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half," wrote a blogger on AcademicHack, a site about technology in academia. "This carried with it a range of benefits, from more productive classroom conversations (people were more willing to talk, and more respectful of others), and also helped me to understand what type of students they were."

For all of the possible academic applications of the site, Twitter remains primarily a social networking site for personal updates.

Even among students who use Twitter extensively, many are unaware of their school's presence on the site or uninterested in what administrators have to say about it. In response to a question about Washington University's presence on Twitter, one student responded, "...The admins should stop wasting their time on twitter and actually, you know, help the students."