I’m fascinated– despite myself– by Twitter, which allows groups of friends to keep up with what each is doing through simple text messages that are propagated to cell phones, IM clients, and web pages/badges.

I am hardly the ideal demographic. I’m well past my early twenties, if my cell phone does text messaging I’m not aware of it, and I have very few friends who care what I am doing at any particular moment. But it still fascinates me and I find myself compelled to keep posting twitters even though there only three people I know who might be reading them, and then only at my behest so I could see how the service works.

The first time I actually started paying attention to Twitter I immediately started thinking of ways it could be used in an educational context. The Smith Magazine 6-word Memoir Contest is an example that points the way. It’s not just the idea of the short memoir, but the immediacy with which it can be propagated to a group that has the power to opt-out and opt-in combined with the low overhead that allows spontaneous contributions.

Poetry, the art that feeds my heart while technology is busy feeding my rational brain, is full of interesting issues and questions regarding performance, spontaneity, real and artificial speech, etc. I could easily see using Twitter as the basis for a nearly real time collaborative poem building activity that would meld together the immediacy of performance with a distributed group… a kind of remote “rounds” session. The results could easily be aggregated and viewed with a badge or fed to a weblog or other site.