Fall 2011 • Vol. 28, Issue 1 - Eagle Online - Niagara University

ON THE RIDGE
Professor Teaching Students History 140 Characters at a Time
By Mike Freedman
6
With each passing tweet, it’s become
more and more apparent that
people are turning to Twitter to
access breaking news. But will college students
turn to the social networking website to learn
about events that have already taken place?
Dr. Mustafa Gökçek hopes so.
e Niagara University assistant professor of
history has compiled a list of 90 major
chronological events that took place between
1945 and 2005. He began disseminating them
as tweets on Sept. 13. Each tweet, a post or
status update on Twitter that can contain a
maximum of 140 characters, will include a link
to a primary source that provides more
information on the event.
e tweets will be sent under the handle of
NUHIS199, a reference to Dr. Gökçek’s course
on America and the Contemporary World.
“A vast majority of our students already have
Twitter accounts and I’m hoping that this will
be a way of making learning about history more
fun,” says Dr. Gökçek. “I have always been
interested in utilizing the latest technology in
my class.”
In the past, students in Dr. Gökçek’s Middle
East history class made short documentaries
using video editing software. He has also used
Skype to video conference in his classes with
students in China and Egypt. Several of Dr.
Gökçek’s colleagues in NU’s History Department
have introduced Facebook as a tool to communicate
with students.
For his newest endeavor, Dr. Gökçek is adopting
software that was developed by Dr. Murat
Demirbas, an associate professor of computer
science at the University of Buffalo. e program
was developed to send tweets at scheduled
intervals, making it possible to cover 60 years of
history by sending 90 tweets in 90 days, the
approximate duration of the fall semester.
Dr. Gökçek takes the project one step further.
Instead of simply sending out one tweet daily,
the computer program can be manipulated so
that one historical year translates to one and a
half days. erefore, if two events occurred one
year apart, the tweets profiling those events will
be sent one and a half days from each other. If
they took place two years apart, there will be a
three-day difference between tweets, and so on.
“e nature of this project will help students
better understand the timeline of major events,
the time difference between each one, and the
historical context in which each event took
place,” explains Dr. Gökçek. “It will also
encourage the students to follow the links to
primary sources and contribute more effectively
in class discussions.”
Students enrolled in HIS199 have taken to the
project. ose without Twitter accounts have
registered with the site. At the end of the
semester, they will prepare poster presentations
based on what they’ve learned throughout
the experience. Based on this project’s success,
Dr. Gökçek and his colleagues will explore making
the format applicable to other courses and perhaps
even adding a testing component.
“This is certainly quite a new project for all of
us and we are all excited to be a part of it,” says
Dr. Gökçek. “We encourage anyone who is
interested to follow us on Twitter.”