In a post earlier this month on the UW–Madison WritingCenter’s blog, I argue that writing
centers
have a lot to gain by establishing a serious, sustained presence on Twitter. At the heart of that argument is the observation that too many writing centers, including ours, saw Twitter as just another public kiosk where they could post announcements. Even though writing centers see all writing as conversation, we have strangely avoided the opportunities social media make available for entering into conversations with our students.
have a lot to gain by establishing a serious, sustained presence on Twitter. At the heart of that argument is the observation that too many writing centers, including ours, saw Twitter as just another public kiosk where they could post announcements. Even though writing centers see all writing as conversation, we have strangely avoided the opportunities social media make available for entering into conversations with our students.
This observation is hardly unique. Jackie Grutsch McKinney identified this as a major failing of writing center Twitter feeds in 2010,
and when Jennifer Marciniak followed up in 2012 she reached the same conclusion.
Our solution has been to monitor what students at our
university are saying about their papers. Twitter makes this exceptionally easy
to do. To see what our students in Madison are saying about the papers they’re
writing, we can run a search for “paper OR essay near:madison,wi."
Some of the other searches round up tweets that mention “madison” and essays,
all the tweets that link to our website materials, all the tweets about writing
centers, and so on.
As an aside, this powerful search is one reason Twitter is
likely to remain an important force in campus life even as Facebook’s
popularity plateaus.
Many of the results from this search are not relevant to our
writing center, of course. The search picks up high school students, for
example, and it finds many students who are complaining in unproductive
language about having to write at all. But many students are tweeting about
writing their essays, and when we find them we can easily respond with a note
of encouragement.
This direct contact with students shocks many of the people who
have heard me discuss our Twitter strategy, and it’s the part that shocked me
when I first heard about it from our university’s social media professionals.
After all, this is peering into our students’ lives and talking to them from an
institutional account. As writers who have grown up recognizing a clear divide
between our public personas and our private selves, many of us are uncomfortable
with the thought that an institution can interrupt a conversation between a
student and her friends.
But students who use Twitter do so knowing what they say is
public. Many students choose Twitter because of its no-nonsense privacy
controls. Almost anyone who has tried to change Facebook’s privacy settings has
encountered the “friends of friends” problem: it is easy to set your account so
that some people you thought couldn’t see your posts and comments in fact can.
Twitter’s privacy settings are, by contrast, foolproof: your posts are visible
by default to the entire world; by flipping one switch, the Twitter user can
ensure you’re visible only to the people you want. The Electronic Frontier
Foundation announced this month, in its annual survey of online privacy
protection, that Twitter is the only major social network that fights for its
users’ privacy in every arena (https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013).
Students who tweet about what they are writing are conscious
of the fact that their schools can see them, and have been regularly delighted
to hear from us. Here are a couple recent interactions we have had with
students:
As these examples show, students who learn that our Writing
Center has a Twitter presence will begin to ask us questions about our
services, and to engage with us as part of their academic lives. As our
director, Brad Hughes, has written elsewhere, writing centers occupy a
privileged place in the university that allows us to be flexible and responsive
to academic needs. By maintaining a
conversational Twitter presence that listens and responds to student interests,
writing centers keep an eye out for the next collaborative opportunity at the
same time they help prove that all writing is interactive.
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