Tuesday, June 9, 2009

any(one) can tweet

Sitting at lunch, sodium pretending to be 'soup', Joyce and I talking about Sesame Street turning forty. And since we've already limited our conversations to 140 characters a piece, we're now discussing Twitter. And Sesame Street.

What would Cookie Monster tweet?
"Cookie 'sometimes food'? Sometime this! Myum-myum, myum-myum!"

What would Elmo tweet?
"Mr. Noodle creepy to Elmo. Keep window shade down from now on."

What would Ernie tweet?
"@Bert. Thank goodness for twin beds."

Like Historical Tweets, I think that asking students to create tweets for the Sesame Street gang would be a quick, engaging activity, perfect for our creative writing cour -

Maybe we have bigger issues than access to micro-blogging platforms.

3 comments:

Arlene said...

I was just catching up in my blog reader. My friend and I recently went to a Jim Hensen exhibit at Experience Music Project in Seattle. We enjoyed your Cookie Monster, Elmo and Ernie tweets. Then we started thinking what would Big Bird or Oscar say? We thought maybe The Count would say One, tweet, tweet, tweet, two, tweet, tweet, tweet...! Thanks for making us laugh :)

Kathryn J said...

I absolutely love this! I spent the week investigating Twitter for a class on literacies as social practice.

Will your students actually tweet them or feign the conversation on a wiki or some other platform?

Ken Rodoff said...

@arlene: Seems appropriate, and I'd imagine The Count would be sitting in some quaint Italian restaurant, sending his tweet via his new $99 iphone.

@kathryn j: Currently, students around here won't do anything until September! They're taking their final exams right now. We've shown historical tweets, but everything seems to stop at the 'showing' part. Haven't come across many educators yet (face to face) who value micro-blogging as a realistic approach to teaching the art of writing. But I'll definitely promote the concept. I'm closing in on 2000 tweets!