I wrote last month that I love lectures. As part of that post I highlighted the use of Twitter in the classroom by a History lecturer at The University of Texas at Dallas.
In a similar vein Purdue University have developed and are trialling a social-networking tool for the classroom called Hotseat. It allows students to give feedback, ask questions & have mini-discussions initiated by the lecturer (or themselves) while attending classes. The great thing about Hotseat is that students aren’t restricted to a particular input method, there are many ways students can contribute – via the website, SMS, Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. There also seem to be iPhone/iPod Touch Apps.
There are a couple of videos from Purdue explaining it further:
What is Hotseat in your own words?
It’s not clear from the website whether Hotseat will be available to the wider world (for purchase or otherwise).
Personally, if I wasn’t going to use Twitter (and I can understand why some people may not want to for this purpose), I’d use a FriendFeed group for threaded micro-comments in this type of environment.
[…] institutions in the States have gone as far to create their own backchannel tools, for example Hotseat from Purdue University & the free to use Live Question Tool developed by the Harvard […]