making sense of a reading community
TRANSCRIPT
Read and Tweet
• Read the text
• Rewrite it in 140 characters or less, including the hashtag #Farewell
• Fill the form below with your tweet
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Example
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“ T h e w a r w a s c h a n g e d
t o o . ” N o , M r H e m i n g
w a y . T h e w a r n e v e r c
a n g e s . # F a r e w e l l h
.
Rules
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“ T h e w a r w a s c h a n g e d
t o o . ” N o , M r H e m i n g
w a y . T h e w a r n e v e r c
a n g e s . # F a r e w e l l h
.
One space per character
No hyphenation at the end of a line
Spaces between words
Even More Difficult
• Rewrite in bureaucratic style (pastiche)
• Rewrite describing one sense in terms of another (synesthesia)
• Rewrite avoiding the vowel E (lipogram)
• Rewrite using all words which start with the same letter (tautogram)
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“I wouldn’t take a single book to a desert island, because […] I must at least be able to say that I’ve been reading.”
Peter Bichsel
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TwLetteratura (TWL) is a community of people using Twitter and its paradigms – brevity and sharing – to engage themselves in reading texts.
The single rewriting may be paraphrase, variation, comment, free
interpretation, as long as contained in the limit of 140 characters.
Tweets are recombined into a new meaningful paratextual apparatus, using online editorial platforms like Storify or Tweetbook.
BOOK
READERS/REWRITERS COMMUNITY
The text is dissected through the work of
rewriting that is carried out by each member of
the community.
TWEETBOOK INTERNET
A new content is published, which
synthetizes the work of reading, decoding and interpretation of
the community.
CURATORS COMMUNITY
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15,000 user, 5,000 students and 120 schools engaged, workshops with
universities, projects with local governments and cultural institutions.
Texts are intended as any kind of cultural content: books, paintings, sculptures, musical compositions, movies, architecture and other artefacts.
Photo:ChrisJones
We do not read texts on Twitter. We use Twitter as a social space
where individuals can turn reading into a shared experience.
While commenting, summarizing, and rewriting, we do not produce new texts. Our tweets are rather metatexts or epitexts: they
refer to texts that already exist.
“The act of writing is literally moving language from one place to another, boldly proclaiming that context is the new content.” (Kenneth Goldsmith)
TWL developed betwyll, a web-based app designed for reading,
annotating and sharing comments about texts. betwyll is currently
available in invite-only private beta.
Betwyll leverages the dynamics of gamification and an ad hoc user interface to improve the experience provided today via Twitter.
Social Reading Forum
• Between 20 & 31 January 2016 a panel of teachers provided feedback and discussed over 30 topics.
• We used a dedicated TWL-branded community platform set up and hosted by CMNTY, compliant with ESOMAR.
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Respondents’ Profile
• All Italian residents and Italian speaking
• Women: 19; men: 1.
• Age: 30+, variety of professional seniority levels.
• Primary schools: 8; secondary schools: 12.
• Multi-disciplinary panel: teachers in literature & languages (predominantly), history, arts, mathematics.
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Reading, A Way of Life
• Reading arouses a myriad of emotions and experiences.
• It relates to escapism, relax and dreams and thus ignites a heightened sense of freedom.
• It stimulates reflection and connection with themselves and with the world(s) outside.
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Offline/Online
• Print books remain the preferred format, but teachers are fond of e-books as well.
• Teachers are all using multiple devices and social networks are commonly used.
• Teachers are convinced that they can help millennials to unleash the full/true potential of social media.
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Literature in the Classroom
• Reading at school stimulates openness, dialogue, sharing of ideas and reflections, fantasy, discovery.
• It’s even better when it is done in the form of reading aloud.
• Otherwise it is an overwhelming “fatigue” related to attitudinal and economic aspects.
• Therefore it might result in a feeling of frustration and isolation.
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Strength of Method
• TWL forces students to to pay attention to spelling, grammar and semantics.
• It enhances creativity.
• It encourages to formulate/exchange ideas.
• It increases self-esteem among students.
• It enables contacts with other schools.
• It stimulates books purchase or visits to libraries.
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Community as a Brend
• Teachers who apply the TWL method feel part of a strong community.
• They see themselves not as mere users or contributors but experience their bond with TWL as a kind of co-ownership.
• The vast majority of the teachers who took part in the research are actual promoters, as the +86 Net Promoter Score demonstrates.
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Net Promoter Score
• It measures the likelihood to recommend (on a 0-10 points scale).
• The score is the delta between the percentage of promoters (those giving a 9 or 10 on 10) minus the percentage of detractors (those giving a 0-6 score).
• In the case of TWL the score is based on n = 14, with 86% promoters and 0% detractors.
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Measuring Impact
• First feedbacks from schools show that we make people read more and better.
• We are currently defining a protocol to get a quantitative measure of the impact.
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Social Impact
• Do we encourage students to read books?
• Do we contribute to the prevention of school dropout?
• Are we able to leverage cultural heritage as an engine of innovation?
• …
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Learning Objectives
• Linguistic skills: decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension
• Collaborative skills
• Critical thinking skills and literary competence
• Media literacy skills
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