Blog about Twitter

In my personal opinion, a Twitter discussion allows people to be themselves more than a Blackboard Discussion does. I feel like what I'm saying sounds a lot more like me when I'm posting on Twitter. On Blackboard I feel like I have to be 100% professional. When someone shares something funny I can't respond with acronyms like 'lol' and I can't include emojis. I personally use emojis to show the faces that I might be making when they can't see me. I feel like emojis adds a lot to the conversation because when you can't see or hear a person, the meaning behind the message can get lost. Emojis give me another way to communicate any meaning lost that might have occurred without them. 

In-class discussions, however, allow us to see nonverbal signals that people give us so emojis aren't needed. For example, if we see people nodding their heads along with our comment then we know that we're probably on the right track. If people are giving us weird looks then we might be giving an answer that is way off topic. By seeing these signals we are able to adjust our comments and hopefully get to the right answer eventually. Without these signals in Twitter and Blackboard discussions we are left to rely only on the words that a person tells us. Sometimes they could be lying or just as lost as we are and could mislead us into thinking we got a right answer when we didn't. Nonverbal cues are always more honest than a person's words. 

Another big difference between Twitter and Blackboard discussions is the amount of characters we have to talk about our point of view and comment on one another's posts. On Twitter we are limited by 280 characters and on Blackboard we could potentially go on forever. I think that limiting how much we can say challenges us to be more straightforward and creative with our word choice. On Blackboard, because we don't have a limit, we tend to say a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff just to make a point that could have been explained in fewer words. There are also times where we will comment long comments just to make it seem like actually understood something we read. 

An in-class discussion can be compared to a Blackboard discussion in this way. People sometimes lose their train of thought when giving a comment and they will go around in circles trying to remember their point. They hardly have time to formulate a proper response when information is being presented to them in present time, but that's just life. Communication skills are vital and in-class discussions help us to build on our communication skills.While Twitter and Blackboard discussions help us build up our communication skills as well, I think that they build up our writing skills more. 

All these different forms of discussions teach us a lot of different skills and challenge us in different ways. It just depends on how we use the limitations we are given, or lack there of, in order to make our points clearly to our audience. We could say the same thing in Twitter, Blackboard and in-class discussions, we would probably just word it differently.