Improving groupwork and reading comprehension capabilities. Speech presented at the Training Week for Staff Capacity Building Perspectives and Modernization of Higher Education (Pavia, September 20-26, 2015)

1. THE USE OF TWITTER
AS A TEACHING TOOL
Training Week for Staff Capacity Building
Perspectives and Modernization of Higher Education
(Pavia, September 20-26, 2015)
paolo.costa@unipv.it
paolocosta
Improving groupwork and reading
comprehension capabilities

2. SUMMARY
- A community of people reading with Twitter
- From Twitter to education
- Towards a performance evaluation framework
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3. A COMMUNITY OF PEOPLE
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4. TwLetteratura is a community of
people using Twitter and its paradigms
– brevity and sharing – to engage
themselves in reading texts.

5. Texts are intended as any kind of cultural content:
books, paintings, sculptures, musical compositions,
movies, architecture and other artefacts.
Photo: Chris Jones

6. We do not read texts on
Twitter. We use Twitter as a
social space where individuals
can turn reading into a shared
experience.

7. While commenting, summarizing, and
rewriting, we do not produce new texts. Our
tweets are rather metatexts or epitexts: they
refer to texts that already exist.

8. “The act of writing is literally moving
language from one place to another, boldly
proclaiming that context is the new content.”
(Kenneth Goldsmith)

9. HOW DOES IT WORK?
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10. The single rewriting may be
paraphrase, variation, comment, free
interpretation, as long as contained in
the limit of 140 characters.

11. Tweets are recombined into a new
meaningful paratextual apparatus,
using online editorial platforms like
Storify or Tweetbook

12. BOOK
READERS/REWRITERS
COMMUNITY
The text is dissected
through the work of
rewriting that is carried
out by each member of
the community.
TWEETBOOKINTERNET
A new content is
published, which
synthetizes the work
of reading, decoding
and interpretation of
the community.
CURATORS
COMMUNITY

13. TwLetteratura is currently developing
betwyll, an app ‘as a service’ – web-based
and fully interchangeable with Twitter –
specifically designed for reading and
rewriting exercises.

14. AT SCHOOL
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15. In 2013 TwLetteratura decided to
experiment with its methodology in schools,
involving a number of teachers who were
already close to the community.

16. Between 2014 and 2013 more than 70
primary and secondary schools
(around 4,500 students) were involved.

17. In primary school children didn’t go online
autonomously. Their experience on Twitter
was mediated by their teachers, who created
and managed group accounts for each class.

18. WHAT TO MEASURE
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19. SOCIAL IMPACT
- Encourage students to read books
- Contribute to the prevention of school dropout
- Leverage cultural heritage as an engine of innovation
- …
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20. LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Linguistic skills
- Collaborative skills
- Critical thinking skills and literary competence
- Media literacy skills
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21. LINGUISTIC SKILLS
- Decoding
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension
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22. COLLABORATIVE SKILLS
- Give a compliment
- Accept criticism
- Encourage others
- Summarize our thoughts and our intentions
- Clarify what we have in mind
- Express empathy
- Understand others’ feelings
- Listen to others’ messages
- Apologize in case of mistake
- Deal with others’ anger
- Avoid trouble with others
- Respond to failure of the group
- Complete a task as expected by others
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23. CRITICAL THINKING
- Objectivity, that means the ability of the reader to set
aside presuppositions, personal opinions, or
commonplaces
- Structure-driven vision, that means the ability to
recognize the structure of the text and the way it
contributes to make it meaningful
- Capacity of make implications and inferences,
starting from the explicit content of the text
- Ability of putting questions, challenging the point of
view of the text
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24. LITERACY
- Figures of speech such as metaphor, simile,
personification, hyperbole, epithet, apostrophe, oxymoron,
metonymy
- Narrative and poetic devices such as plot, story,
character, point-of-view, setting; irony, satire, paradox;
assonance, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm
- Specific text features such as theme, style
- Literary trends such as Classicism, Romanticism, Realism,
Modernism
- Literary forms such as the diary, the epigram, the heroic
poem, the mock-heroic poem, the ode, the sonnet
- Literary genres such as novel, play, short-story, poem,
sketch
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25. MEDIA LITERACY
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Skill Description
Impact
Low High
Play The capacity to experiment with the surroundings as a form of
problem solving ü
Performance The ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of
improvisation and discovery ü
Simulation The ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world
processes ü
Appropriation The ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
ü
Multitasking The ability to scan the environment and shift focus onto salient
details ü
Distributed cognition The ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental
capacities ü
Collective intelligence The ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward
a common goal ü
Judgment The ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different
information sources ü
Transmedia navigation The ability to follow the flow of stories and information across
multiple modalities ü
Networking The ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
ü
Negotiation The ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and
respecting multipleperspectives ü

26. FURTHER INFORMATION
- twletteratura.org
- @tw_letteratura
- paolocosta.net
- @paolocosta
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