After reading endless posts on Facebook dwarfing Twitter daily, including Techcrunch today, this lesser distributed article about Twitter in the classroom from InsideHigerEd prognosticates the power of Twitter over Facebook for creative use in classrooms.

Specifically, as students get more savvy with Twitter, one can imagine professors creating a hashtag for commenting during their class.

The overriding theme is the creation of instant dynamic groups by simply the communication of one nugget of information (eg here’s one: #uclapsych101jones).  For instructors who choose not to acknowledge and embrace this possibility, they simply run the risk of not being a part of the dialogue.   For instance, in a second iteration, it’s also easy to see students privately creating a more opaque hashtag and tweeting through their secret identities, launching an instant semi-private chat room during class.

Such dynamic groups will spread like H1N1.  It couldn’t have been the case when these pieces appeared this summer:

• Well circulated Matthew Robson Report (Morgan Stanley intern) from July.
• NYTimes article about Teens not tweeting from August citing ComScore.
• Mashable post on same subject also from August citing Neilsen.

Anyway, I’m not the first blogger to reverse the summer wisdom of Twitter not for teens; a number of news blogs, including SAI, Mashable and Brian Solls published the reverse trend from the more recent September ComScore report, which measures tons of growth in the youth demographics for Twitter.

Three other broad conclusions to note:

1. Real-time classroom use of Twitter necessitates more expert usage of the medium via live persistent search using Tweetdeck or an iPhone app instead of the Twitter.com interface.
2. Twitter value lies much deeper than trending topics and celebrities (my blog from the summer).
3. Measuring the web traffic of Twitter and using that to predict its demise is a fool’s game.