The students tweet during class. Under normal circumstances, they would be accused of having a low level of interest in participating in the class. But what if tweeting were encouraged as one form of class participation? Not only that, what if they earned marks for class participation for each of the thoughts and questions that they tweeted and, in some cases, the professor mentioned their tweets and commented on them on the spot?
When we heard that there were such lectures in one of the sociology classes, we went directly to the course professor to ask about them. Our interview revealed that he was first attracted to online forums (those used before the Internet era and operated on membership and email services) and since then he has been researching the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and society. The interview also showed that he has spent long years trying to create a spirit of "conviviality" in his classes.

I use Twitter during class to have the students tweet their thoughts and opinions in real time. At the same time, I have created a site on PandA* where I have them write review exercises as the "public assignments", and give feedback as the "reactions and comments". I have them create special accounts on Twitter and designate the hashtag so that students can share comments among themselves. The second page of the materials that I hand out contains screenshots of the most recent Twitter exchanges.
* PandA: A learning management system (LMS) provided in Kyoto University's Institute for Information Management and Communication. Click here for more details.

That's right. At first, there were not many students who were interested in participating in tweeting, but there has been a relative increase since the year before last.

I use it in two courses: Sociology I and Socio-Information Studies. The former is a liberal arts and sciences course that covers a wide range of sociological themes, while the latter is a mixed undergraduate-graduate course in which I deal with rather specialized themes.

It's all very mechanical: one tweet equals one point. Note, however, that I set a time limit so that, as a rule, only tweets in real time during class count. On PandA, each public assignment counts as three points, and each reaction or comment counts as two points. Students may earn a maximum of 40 points, and if they participate wholeheartedly, they soon reach 40 points. Therefore, I tell them to participate on whatever time schedule they like. Even so, there are students who provide a steady stream of comments.

Well, among the thoughts expressed during the last academic year was the opinion that while some students were serious about expressing their opinions, there were some who just continued sending out poorly thought-out messages simply to earn points. Participation in and of itself seems to affect students' awareness. I feel that the way students' awareness is reflected in these thoughts is rather interesting.

The concepts are the same, but the major difference is that the students can read what the other students are writing. I think that it is important to "publish" the content of the questions and thoughts, but when I read students' thoughts at the end of the term, I find that most of them feel that knowing what other students think is very stimulating, so I think this format is fulfilling my initial objectives.
Another difference is that, from the instructor's point of view, having digital data remaining makes it simple to figure out marks for class participation. If they're recorded on a paper sheet, then you need to calculate them by hand.

That depends on how you define "learning." Viewed in terms of "output," my impression is that there hasn't been much of a change. But if you think of learning in terms of everything it involves, not just in terms of output but in terms of students' attitudes toward class participation in real time, I have a definite sense that classes are more lively.

Yes, I do. I have heard that there are many instructors who try to encourage participation through such means as incorporating group discussions. That is effective to a certain extent, but when you do that, the discussions inevitably end up taking a lot of time, which leaves less time to devote to the lecture, so it feels like a sort of bottleneck.
For a long time, I have considered the question of how to make nearly two-way communication possible without cutting down the amount of time devoted to lectures and also encouraging the students' sense of participation, but I think that my current format is one of the solutions.

Actually, the motivation for my current research started from one of my hobbies.
Beginning around the 1990s, before Internet participation was really widespread, I was involved in online forums,* and not as an individual user. Instead, I established a network that I administered myself, creating a venue for communication. This was a very stimulating experience, and it also led to my research, so that now the object of my research is issues concerning communication or community in an Internet-oriented society. What is stimulating about this is my sense that ICT and computer networks and things like that are not mere tools, but are communities in themselves, and that the very act of participating in them is interesting. That feeling was the most essential experience in beginning my research.
On that point, about the time the Internet was emerging in the U.S., there were developers who were called "hackers," and in the same way, they did not employ the ICT merely as tools. They tended to find it interesting in itself to use technology to create venues. There is a theoretical basis for this too, presented in Ivan Illich's book Tools for Conviviality. The word "conviviality" can sometimes be translated by Japanese words that mean "independent co-existence," but that definition seems a bit too stiff. In more understandable terms, it has the nuance of gathering in a friends group, finding something interesting, pursuing that interest together, and enjoying the very act of doing so. Illich uses the word as a concept in theories of technology, but it may be a concept that is also applicable to pedagogy, too.
*Online forums: A form of online service used before the Internet became widespread, involving members-only forums and email services.

That's right. It becomes very easy for them to express themselves. If the number of students in a lecture is not very large, you can target the students who are sitting in front and have them speak, but in large lecture classes, like the ones in the liberal arts and sciences curriculum, that gradually becomes more difficult.
Even in a class like Socio-Information Studies, a combined undergraduate-graduate course, which is open to several undergraduate faculties and graduate schools, including the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, the Faculty of Letters, the Graduate School of Letters, and the Graduate School of Energy Science, students from a wide variety of backgrounds from both the sciences and the humanities－participate in it. For that reason, most of the students are unfamiliar with one another, so it's a rather anonymous place. Partly for that reason, using something like Twitter, which allows the students to speak anonymously, makes it easier for the students to speak.

I can think of quite a few, but when I lectured on gender, students tweeted examples of "paternity harassment." That refers to the problem of men being harassed by superiors and colleagues for taking paternity or childcare leave. Of course, I already knew the phenomenon itself occurs, but I didn't know the actual word, so finding out what it was called was a discovery for me. As I continue looking at the students' reactions, I get the impression that their interests have changed a lot in the past ten years. I think another example is that attitudes toward sexual minorities have also changed a lot.
Being able to mention specific examples of things I hadn't thought of in class gives the students a feeling of immediacy about the field of sociology.

Indeed.

There are all kinds of possibilities, so I can't speak in general terms. But on the technological side of things, we need ways to lower the hurdles to technology, not only for students but also for instructors who use it. For example, in my case, I reflect the use of Twitter in marks for class participation. Because collecting the tweets of large numbers of students and calculating their points by hand is a laborious task, I use a programming language called PERL to calculate them. Mechanisms for supporting things like that will be increasingly necessary. It would also be helpful to make systems customizable and flexible to a certain extent.

When you aren't accustomed to a system, you shouldn't dive right into it. Instead, you should set up a trial period for about a semester. When you try things out, you may run into problems you didn't expect. With Twitter, for example, unless students have a registered account, you can't give them credit for marks for class participation, but sometimes the students make mistakes in writing when they register, or they insert invisible spaces, which makes it impossible for the program to search their accounts and yield the proper number of points. In order to overcome those technological problems as easily as possible, you need to introduce the technology on a trial basis once.
On the other hand, if you use Twitter not for adding up marks for class participation but just for getting an idea of the students' thoughts, that lowers the hurdle. In that case, the trick is to attach a hashtag. That makes it easy for the instructor and the students to share tweets.

That's right. You certainly have to know all sorts of little tricks in order to use it in class. With Twitter, for example, knowing when to comment is an important point. Commenting at odd times disrupts the flow of the class, so you have to make judgments on a case-by-case basis. I bring in an iPad, separate from the computer that I use for projecting slides. I use it to check the Twitter timeline as needed, and I try to comment when the lecture reaches a natural stopping point. Sometimes I take tweets that I couldn't follow up on during class, look at them after class, and reply to them.

Right. I hope the university will build systems that support this aspect of it. For example, when it comes to linking KULASIS and PandA, well, KULASIS lists names by faculty, school, and institute while PandA lists names by class. For example, in a class like Socio-Information Studies, which is open to several faculties and schools, it would be convenient to have a system that could assign grade points on a roster linking the two systems. I'd really like to ask the university to do this. Also, when you use PandA's forums tool, it is set up so that you can always see who has spoken. Depending on the instructor or the content of the class, it may be better to allow anonymity, so I think it would be even better to be able to customize the PandA forums in that way.

It was my pleasure. Thank you.

Questions asked by Motoko Okumoto and Takeo Suzuki
Article composition: Takeo Suzuki
Interview date: July 29, 2016

Published online: May 15, 2017 (Original article)
May 21, 2018 (English article)