Twitter 101

Journalism is changing, and one journalism school is right there updating its coursework to keep up. Griffith University in Australia has recently made Twitter education a requirement for its journalism students.

According to a post on Mashable, the school began to worry that some of the students’ tweets weren’t as substantial as they could have been, and that the students were missing out on a key skill that future employers would expect in the new media environment they’re likely to enter post-graduation.

While some students felt that the introduction of a class dedicated to Twitter will be a waste of time, there is some merit to cultivating a crop of students who are fluent in 140-word conversations. It fosters micro-editing skills, offers excellent practice in headline writing and myriad other things, as discussed in a previous post.

So what’s your take, journalism students? Would you like to see Twitter education introduced to your coursework? If not, what other aspects of new media would you like a crash course in before you graduate?

While you’re thinking about it, why not follow J-Source on Twitter? You can also follow some of J-Source’s editors and Robert Washburn’s J-Source Innovate feed.