What do Vampires and Twitter have in Common?

By Ernesto Priego. While I'm not sure the Twitter bird shares Dracula's thirst for blood (and I highly doubt vampires share the bluejay's affinity for posts under 140 characters), Twitter and Dracula do have one thing in common: they make for excellent class discussion.
While there's likely much other potential for Twitter in academia, my undergraduate English class at UW-Green Bay has utilized the social media feed as a medium for collaborative note-taking in our discussion-based course.  Here's how we do it: we start with 6 books, 6 projects, and 6 groups; throughout the semester, the projects rotate between groups as we work through the different texts.  My group was assigned the Twitter project for our time with Dracula.  This project called for the six of us (in a class of roughly 35) to Tweet notable points of our classroom discussions on the book.  We used the hashtag #Eng333Dracula to categorize our Tweets, and the hashtag's live-stream appeared on the board during discussion.  Following class, we uploaded the Tweets to a Storify document, deleted duplicates, and added categories and explanations for confusing posts.  You can find the end result here. More...