"Twitter Class" and the Future of Journalism

Note: this is a post from Kelley's personal blog, Rants of a Redhead

Ok I’ve jumped on the bandwagon (or maybe drunk the Koolaid) and started a blog. A brief intro to me: I’m a senior at Tufts University who grew up between Malaysia, California, Texas and Indonesia. I studied in Paris for a year and am now in the delightful position of figuring out my next move after graduation.

But most importantly for this blog, I am a huge journalism and social media geek doing a senior project on the future of journalism.… which brings me to the point. I was amazed yesterday when I saw the British Government's plans to include social media in elementary school curriculum; to be fair, the UK government and cutting edge rarely end up in the same sentence (I saw Tony Blair speak this year at Tufts- brilliant and funny, yes, but hip he is not).

Do you really need to teach digital natives (great research being done at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center) something they will undoubtedly absorb independently? The short answer is no, but if done right, there’s a greater opportunity here to promote media literacy and the civic importance of journalism among kids. Twitter, Facebook and the like have already transformed both how we produce news and how we consume it (my personal favorites to get news are Twitter and Google Reader). If in teaching kids Twitter, you make them feel connected to an online community, be it local or more global in scope, you can then encourage them to want to consume and produce news, if only about Fluffy, the new family rabbit. Baby steps here.

If done well, the UK could have a media-literate future generation of journalists on their hands (let’s just hope we’ve figured out a solid monetization model by then…more on that later). Also in the mix is the argument that Twitter makes you a better writer. The flip side: if all we do is teach kids the mechanics of tweeting, the students might as well teach the teacher.